This was the year that AI really took off.
Sure, ChatGPT has already had three birthdays, and Claude and Gemini were both released to the public in 2023. Even Grok is older than it acts.
But it wasn’t until 2025 that you couldn’t scroll for five seconds without running into AI content, AI agents, and long-winded LinkedIn posts about how AI is either a blessing or a curse.
AI’s pervasiveness went up and down the stack as developers across all categories integrated AI into everything. Others used vibe coding tools to create new apps.
AI’s monumental year is apparent from the sheer number of AI launches we’ve seen at Product Hunt. Of the top 15 launches on Product Hunt, thirteen were tagged “Artificial Intelligence”:
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Dreamina: “All-in-one AI creative suite for all your creative work”
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MGX: “The first AI dev team”
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Sider 5.0: “Mimic human research and save findings in an AI knowledge base”
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Tana: “Put your notes to work with voice and AI”
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Tanka: “AI messenger with smart reply and long-term memory for teams”
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TestSprite 1.0: “First AI agent automating the entire software testing process”
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Aha: “The world’s first AI influencer marketing team”
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Chronicle: “Stunning presentations with AI, no design skills required”
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21st.dev: “Github + Pinterest to make your AI websites look beautiful”
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Sagehood: “AI agents for a 360-degree analysis of the U.S. stock market”
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Wegic: “Your first AI website team”
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PageOn.A! 2.0: “Cursor for visual communication, beyond slides”
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Basalt: “Integrate AI in your product in seconds”
(The remaining two in the top 15, Screen Studio 3.0 and Bubble for native mobile apps, featured meaningful AI integrations.)
And this doesn’t include any of the OpenAI launches — including GPT-5, ChatGPT Images, and Sora 2, the latter of which connects to a TikTok-like feed of AI-generated videos created with user prompts. It doesn’t include Claude by Anthropic’s Opus 4.5, which is a heavy-hitter for coding work. Nor does it include Google’s Gemini 3, which is vying with GPT and Claude for chatbot supremacy. And don’t sleep on Grok 4.1, xAI’s December release that doubles down on its very-online voice.
And we didn’t even mention Cursor AI, the code editor that achieved Uber and Airbnb status this year— as in “Cursor for XYZ.”
AI is simply where everything is happening.
But 2026 may be a different story. Not to get all apocalyptic, but the latter half of 2025 was populated by tales of an AI bubble, with multibillion-dollar data center deals and $100M salaries and the like being reported every few days. At the LLM level where Google and OpenAI live, it’s all spending but not yet a lot of revenue.
But given that the internet was also once a bubble, we’re betting that 2026 will see plenty more AI launches. In fact, we’re getting ready to launch some AI-related stuff into, ahem, Orbit ourselves.