What Surprised Us Most In 2025

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
I think perhaps the thing that most surprised me is the extent to which I feel like the AI economy stabilized. We have like the model layer companies, and the application layer companies, and the infrastructure layer companies. Seems like everyone is going to make a lot of money, and there's kind of like a relative playbook for how to build an AI native company on top of the models.

**Harjit** (0:17)
Many episodes ago, we talked about how it was felt easier than ever to peer in and find a startup idea. Because if you could just survive, if you could just wait a few months, there was likely going to be some big announcement that would completely make a new set of ideas possible. And so like finding ideas is sort of returning to sort of normal levels of difficulty.

**Diana** (0:42)
Welcome back to another episode of The Lightcone. Today, we're talking about the most surprising things that we saw this year in 2025 Diana, you found a pretty crazy one. It's sort of a changing of the guard almost in who is the preferred LLM at YC during the YC batch.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:00)
Yes, in fact, we just wrapped up the winter 26 selection cycle for companies. And one of the questions we asked to all the founders that applied to YC is what is your tech stack and model of choice. And one of the shocking things is that for the longest time, OpenAI was the clear winner for all of last year, last couple of batches, though that number has been coming down. And shockingly, in this batch, the number one API is actually Anthropic, came out a bit more than OpenAI, which who would have thought. I think when we started this podcast series back then, OpenAI was like 90 plus percent. And now, Anthropic, who would have thought?

**Diana** (1:46)
Yeah. And you know, they've been hovering around like 20, 25% for most of like 2024 and early 2025 And then only even in the last three to six months did this sort of changing of the guard actually happen.

**SPEAKER_4** (2:01)
They had this hockey stick with the growth over 52%.

**Diana** (2:06)
Why do you think that is?

**SPEAKER_4** (2:07)
I think there's a couple of things in terms of the tech stack selection. I think as we've seen this year, there's been a lot of wins in terms of vibe coding tools that are getting built out there. And coding agents are so many categories that this ended up being a bigger problem space that actually is creating a lot of value. And it turns out the model that performs the best at it is actually models from Anthropic. And I think that's not by accident. I think from the hearing the conversation we had with Tom Brown not too long ago, he came and spoke is that was one of their internal evils. They on purpose made them their North Star. And you can see it in the model taste as a result of what's the best choice of model for a lot of founders building products is Anthropic.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:56)
The vast majority of the use cases people are using it for though is not coding. So I wonder if there's like a bleed through effect where people are using Claude for their personal coding and then as a result they're more likely to choose it for their application even if their application is not doing coding at all.

**Diana** (3:10)
Because you'd be very familiar with like the personality of Claude Opus or whatever they're choosing. Sonnet, I suppose.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:18)
How about Gemini? How's Gemini doing in those rankings?

**SPEAKER_4** (3:21)
Gemini also pretty much has been climbing up pretty high. I think last year was probably single digit percent or even like two, three percent. And now for winter 26 is about 23 percent. And we've personally been using also a lot of Gemini 3.0, and we've been impressed with the quality of it. I think it's really, really working.

**Diana** (3:43)
I mean, they have all different personalities, don't they?

**SPEAKER_4** (3:45)
That too.

**Diana** (3:46)
Yeah.

**SPEAKER_4** (3:47)
It's kind of the classic where OpenAI sort of has the Black Cat energy. And almost like Anthropic is kind of more the happy-go-lucky, a bit more very helpful Golden Retriever. At least that's what I feel when I talk to them.

**SPEAKER_1** (4:00)
And how about Gemini?

**SPEAKER_4** (4:02)
It's kind of like in between.

**Diana** (4:03)
Harjit, you prefer Gemini, actually.

**Harjit** (4:06)
Yeah, I switched to Gemini this year as my go-to model. I think even before 2.5 Pro came out and just seemed better at reasoning for me, it was just like the increasingly I replaced my Google searches with Gemini, and I just sort of trusted that Google's, I think like the groundings API and its ability to actually like use the Google index to give you like real-time information correctly. I just found it was better than, personally I found it was better than all the other tools for that, and it was better than Perplexity on it too. Like Perplexity would be fast, but not always accurate, and Gemini was not quite as fast as Perplexity, but was always pretty accurate if I asked it about something that happened today.