Have we passed peak AI?

AI has garnered a lot of ink lately, as media and finance types like us fret over how long the exorbitant investment in the technology will take to reap returns and if its promise could be crushed by legislation or the weight of its own hype. Companies and their investors can’t seem to talk about anything else.

Normal people, however, seem to be less interested in AI than they used to be. Search volume for the term in the US appears to have peaked earlier this year in May. That leaves AI — once the next best hope of the next big thing — in danger of becoming just another washed-up tech trend of yore like NFTs and the metaverse.

Let’s get this out of the way: How much AI is Googled doesn’t necessarily mean there’s not a bright future for the technology and that all that its boosters have promised won’t come to pass. It just means, for one reason or another, people aren’t looking for information about it quite as often as they once were. Maybe the new tech is already old hat, maybe it has woefully underdelivered, maybe they’re now searching for more specific AI terms, or maybe people simply no longer care as much.

And, of course, that orange line could reverse and continue its trajectory up and to the right. For now though, things are looking down for AI.