The top 20 AI tools of 2025 - and the #1 thing to remember when you use them

Popularity in the tech world is hard to measure. I've talked at length about this in my discussions of programming language popularity. It really comes down to what you use to measure popularity -- and how available those metrics are to those doing the analysis. It's difficult to generically define popularity, especially when you're including tools that do wildly different things. For example, is a general-purpose text-to-image generator like Midjourney inherently more popular than a tool that removes backgrounds from images like Remove.bg?