You’re absolutely right! You astutely observed that 2025 was a year with many LLMs and this was a selection of waypoints, summarized in a helpful timeline.

That’s what most non-tech-person’s year in LLMs looked like.

Hopefully 2026 will be the year where companies realize that implementing intrusive chatbots can’t make better ::waving hands:: ya know… UX or whatever.

For some reason, they think its helpful to distractingly pop up chat windows on their site because their customers need textual kindergarten handholding to … I don’t know… find the ideal pocket comb for their unique pocket/hair situation, or had an unlikely question about that aerosol pan release spray that a chatbot could actually answer. Well, my dog also thinks she’s helping me by attacking the vacuum when I’m trying to clean. Both ideas are equally valid.

And spending a bazillion dollars implementing it doesn’t mean your customers won’t hate it. And forcing your customers into pathways they hate because of your sunk costs mindset means it will never stop costing you more money than it makes.

I just hope companies start being honest with themselves about whether or not these things are good, bad, or absolutely abysmal for the customer experience and cut their losses when it makes sense.

I took the good with the bad: the ai assisted coding tools are a multiplier, google ai overviews in search results are half baked (at best) and often just factually wrong. AI was put in the instagram search bar for no practical purpose etc.

They need to be intrusive and shoved in your face. This way, they can say they have a lot of people using them, which is a good and useful metric.

As much as I side with you on this one, I really don't think this submission is the right place to rant about it.

> For some reason, they think its helpful to distractingly pop up chat windows on their site...

Companies have been doing this "live support" nonsense far longer than LLMs have been popular.