ChatGPT leads the pack of LLMs when it comes to the best choice for developers, according to a new report by New Relic, an AI-based observability platform that helps businesses eliminate interruptions in digital experiences.
The report, which was based on the usage data of about 85,000 of its customers over a period of one year, reveals that developers are using the largest general-purpose models, led by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which accounted for more than 86 per cent of all LLM tokens processed by New Relic customers.
The maiden report, AI Unwrapped: 2025 AI Impact Report, captures how developer choices fundamentally transform the AI ecosystem.
The findings also highlight increased model diversification as developers explore open-source alternatives, specialised domain solutions and task-specific models, although at a smaller scale.
Meta’s Llama emerged as the model that saw the second largest amount of LLM tokens processed by New Relic customers. In fact, New Relic saw a 92 per cent increase in the number of unique models used across AI apps in the first quarter of 2025.
“AI is rapidly moving from innovation labs and pilot programmes into the core of business operations,” New Relic Chief Technical Strategist Nic Benders said.
“While ChatGPT is the undisputed dominant model, developers are also moving at the ‘speed of AI,’ and rapidly testing the waters with the latest models as soon as they come out,” he said.
The data show ChatGPT-4o has been dominating more recently, followed by ChatGPT-4o mini. However, adoption of ChatGPT from version-to-version is occurring seemingly overnight as developers pivot towards newer, better, faster and cheaper models.
“New Relic users have been rapidly shifting from ChatGPT-3.5 Turbo to ChatGPT-4.1 mini since it was announced in April. This shows that developers value cutting-edge performance and features more than savings,” the report said.
Python domination
With the most momentum, support and tooling, the data show Python continues to dominate AI applications, with customer adoption growing nearly 45 per cent since last quarter. Node.js followed Python. However, Java usage has grown rapidly at 34 per cent since last quarter, signalling more production-grade, Java-based LLM applications are to come from large enterprises.