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Shocking: 20% of Top AI Apps Are Companions

Andreessen Horowitz (better known as a16z), Silicon Valley’s $46 billion venture capital powerhouse, just dropped its semi-annual list of the Top 50 AI apps and the results are a bit shocking.

Not because ChatGPT is still #1 (no surprise there), but because nearly one in five of the top apps aren’t productivity tools or search assistants: they’re AI companions.

Daily life is increasingly filled with AI bots people talk to for company. Whether that’s healthy or alarming is a growing debate, but the numbers don’t lie: companion AI is mainstream.

The biggest twist is Ani, tucked inside Elon Musk’s AI assistant Grok, which is embedded in social media platform X.

Grok itself has surged into the top tier (#4 on web, #23 on mobile). But hidden within is Ani, a Goth-anime–inspired companion AI, designed not just to answer questions but to simulate emotional presence. That single feature is fueling engagement at scale.

Why does this matter? Because Ani is no fringe experiment. It’s sitting inside one of the fastest-growing AI platforms. For all the hype around AI copilots and productivity, the real growth may be in AI friends. nd that shift could leave us both fascinated and deeply uneasy.

AI Stethoscope Spots Heart Disease in 15 Seconds

The stethoscope, largely unchanged for 200 years, has been enhanced with AI and can now detect heart conditions in just 15 seconds.

Developed at Imperial College London with support from the British Heart Foundation, the device, built by California-based Eko Health, combines traditional listening with a rapid ECG (a test that records the heart’s electrical activity). The recordings are uploaded securely, analyzed by AI, and results appear on a smartphone.

In one of the UK’s largest primary care trials, covering 200 practices and 1.5 million patients, the AI stethoscope outperformed standard methods. Doctors were more than twice as likely to diagnose heart failure, 3.5 times more likely to detect atrial fibrillation, and nearly twice as likely to spot valve disease.

Professor Nicholas Peters of Imperial College called it “a first in centuries,” noting that three major conditions can now be identified in a single sitting.

Researchers caution, however, that the device is not for routine use in healthy patients, since false positives remain an issue: about two-thirds flagged for heart failure were later cleared after further testing.

Even so, the upgrade feels transformative, a long-awaited evolution of medicine’s most iconic tool. 🩺

Should Fast Food Ditch AI Drive-Thrus?

Taco Bell’s big experiment with AI drive-throughs isn’t exactly going as planned.

The chain rolled out voice AI at over 500 locations across the US to speed up orders and reduce mistakes. But instead of quick and easy taco runs, customers have been sharing hilarious clips of the system glitching out.

One man “crashed” the AI by ordering 18,000 cups of water, while another went viral after the bot kept asking, “And what will you drink with that?” no matter what he said.

Millions have watched these bloopers on TikTok and Instagram. Taco Bell says the AI has still processed more than two million successful orders, though it now plans to keep human staff ready to step in when the bots get overwhelmed. What do you think?