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What an amazing set of data!

The "Generative AI services popularity" [1] chart is surprising. ChatGPT is being #1 makes sense, but Character.AI being #2 is surprising, being ahead of Anthropic, Perplexity, and xAI. I suspect this data is strongly affected by the services DNS caching strategies.

The other interesting chart is "Workers AI model popularity" [2]. `llama-3-8b-instruct` has been leading at 30% to 40% since April. That makes it hands the most popular weights available small "large language model". I would have expected Meta's `m2m100-1.2b` to be more used, as well as Alphabet's `Gemma 3 270M` starting to appear. People are likely using the most powerful model that fits on a CF worker.

As shameless plug, for more popularity analysis, check out my "LLM Assistant Census" [3].

[1] https://radar.cloudflare.com/ai-insights#generative-ai-servi...

[2] https://radar.cloudflare.com/ai-insights?dateRange=24w#worke...

[3] https://aleyan.com/blog/2025-llm-assistant-census/



Character.AI is extremely popular among youngers so it's not really surprising.


What exactly is Character.AI? There's literally no info on their website.


Chat for teens.


choose-your-own-adventure style chatbots


With a lot of characters/scenarios of a sexual nature. They are the market leader for NSFW LLM experiences. Or maybe it's more accurate to call them "dating" experiences


Why would DNS caching skew results?

I don’t think Cloudflare is using DNS queries to compile the stats considering they have visibility into the full http requests for sites they proxy.

Edit: Another comment mentions DNS queries. Did I miss something about how they’re compiling the stats?


The heading says “Generative AI services popularity - Top 10 services based on 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver traffic”


1.1.1.1 will see the query regardless of caching by upstream servers. Downstream and client caching probably averages out quite nicely with enough volume.


If the TTL of one domain’s records are all shorter than the TTLs of another domain’s, what would make downstream and client caching cancel out? Do clients not respect TTLs these days?

(In this particular case, I don’t think the TTLs are actually different, but asking in general)




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