So-called "companion" AIs are usually overlooked because they are clearly predatory. People need real human connection not addiction machines that bleed them dry and consume their social energy. Making a buck on someone else's misery is no way to live!

The churn is brutal. Once people have gotten over the novelty of an AI companion they quickly grow disatisified with the limitations and leave. It’s a lot like a game that people play with for a bit then leave when they’ve done everything they can do.

Maybe. FWIW the majority of the apps that have taken off are basically AI girlfriends/AI boyfriends. Using these is fundamentally a shameful act which probably deflates retention.

There may be high retention use cases that find ways to serve user needs without embarrassing them.

If someone installed the app in the first place, aren't they already over that hurdle?

They crossed the hurdle once but are less willing to do so repeatedly (so they churn)

That's not what the numbers coming from some of these companies say — for example, chai app, publicly shares that their W52 retention is 20%.

So, 20% of users who send a message just retain forever.

Source: https://www.chai-research.com/chai_roadmap_2025.pdf

Their charts measure 50 weeks, not forever. So an 80% yearly churn is not exactly a good statistic. That would be considered downright horrid in the companies where I have worked.

It's pretty amazing considering the product is literally calling openai with a prompt.

If I'm reading that right, 60% of their users give up after the first week, half of those who stick with it give up after another month or two, and then there appears to be continued decline afterwards.

Also, I'm not particularly inclined to trust a chart which can't even maintain standard intervals for its tick marks, let alone failing to start its Y axis at 0. Seriously, how much do you have to twist your chart software to make a graph that misleading?

Excel defaults to automatically adjusting both axis ranges. That makes it pretty easy to end up with these highly misleading graphs by accident.

I can understand not starting at 0; it's the varying tick spacing that has me confused.

That chart says:

50% leave within 1 week

75% leave within 5-10 weeks

85% leave within a year

Are you trying to spin 80% yoy churn as good?

Did you get your MBA from the back of a mail order catalog?

hardly forever. Given the age of the company you're citing, they can only estimate retention out to 1 year.

none of these companies have existed long enough to make claims about users staying around "forever"

This is a good place for a brief intro to statistical literacy. I don't fault the report per se because they're measuring what is possible to measure, and framing it in the best possible light since the entire point of this slide deck is a pitch to investors. But it's riddled with nonsense that mirrors the challenges of social science and causes of the replication crisis we bemoan in non-profit research but seem to blink zero eyes over when it's industrial research.

Is user retention an ergodic process? Clearly no. From economic first principles, we know elasticity of demand is going to depend upon substitutability and disposable income of the user base. Both of these can and do change over time. From empirical results elsewhere, we can simply look at products that have existed for more than a single year and observe that user retention rates in 1995 did not always match retention rates for the same product in 2002.

Here we get measurement of a single cohort that has actually reached 50 weeks. Are they representative of a typical cohort? We have no way to know. And again, fair, this is the best the company can possibly do. They can't create data that doesn't exist and they can't draw conclusions that have no hard evidence for or against. But you don't need to draw unwarranted conclusions, either. It's also 15% at 50 weeks retention in that first cohort, not 20% at 52 weeks. Does that mean those 15% of users will stick around forever? We have no idea. Sort of. We actually know for certain they won't because they're mortal and will die. Setting that aside, might they at least become lifelong users? I suppose it's possible, but even real-world friendships rarely last a lifetime. Will the next cohort at least still show 15% at 50 weeks? We yet again have no idea.

The numbers are saying exactly what I said.

Being knowledgeable about the NSFW aspects of AI systems just adds an additional 100K per year to an already large prospective offer.

Civit.ai, the primary competitor to huggingface (i.e. github for AI) for diffusion models, might as well be a brothel with how horny it is. Over half of all "low rank adapters/Loras" every created are most likely NSFW in nature.

I'm just waiting to see how they monetize their userbase. Last time I checked they made $1/user a year(~20m active users/ 20m revenue). It's predominately a whale market where traffic is driven by power users. You have mobile gacha games like Genshin Impact that make ~$10/user a MONTH (~5m active users/ 50m in monthly revenue)...