Last Friday's Bespoke Report was our quarterly Equity Market Pros and Cons edition. In it, we noted the boom of artificial intelligence both in terms of search interest (measured by Google Trends data) and mentions of the term in the earnings calls of mega caps. Google Trends data measures how much a given term(s) is being searched for on Google's search engine. That interest is indexed with 100 being the peak in searches. Thus a reading of 75 would be when search interest is 75% of said peak, 50 would be 50% of the peak, and so on. Google Trends also allows for comparisons across multiple terms to evaluate relative search interest.

Given the topic of AI is extremely in vogue, we wanted to compare how search interest stands up to bitcoin, which before AI was the last tech craze among investors and the general public. Bitcoin, and crypto more broadly, came into the mainstream as the next big thing in tech in late 2017. As shown below, December 2017 would mark the height of Google searches for "Bitcoin". A few years later in early 2021 when meme stocks were all the rage, search interest for Bitcoin again spiked, but that has been the closest it has come since to returning to 2017 levels of interest. Meanwhile, AI has come to the forefront.

As shown below, searches for "artificial intelligence" or the abbreviation "AI" began to explode higher a little over a year ago with the launch of ChatGPT. Search interest for each of those terms has not ceased rising, and all three just hit record highs last week. As for the actual index values versus Bitcoin, the Trends score for "artificial intelligence" has climbed to 56 and the index for "AI" has gone even higher to 65. That means that search volumes for "AI" are currently around two-thirds as high as search volumes for "Bitcoin" were at the peak in late 2017. That is to say that (as if it wasn't obvious) AI is the buzzword of the time, but it's not quite as buzzy (yet) as Bitcoin was several years ago.

While AI-related searches have quickly risen in popularity, the pace hasn't been as rapid as it was for Bitcoin. In the chart below we show Google Trends scores for the same terms as above, but for each one, we show the two years before their respective peaks. While the bulk of the increase to peak searches for Bitcoin in 2017 occurred in just a few months, the more recent growth in AI searches appears to have been much more steady. That offers at least one counterpoint to assuage concerns over AI being a fad.

(Click on image to enlarge)

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