Has ChatGPT Hit Maximum Buzz?
Noah Giansiracusa, a professor of math at Bentley University in Massachusetts and a visiting scholar at Harvard, offered an interesting post online. Using Google Trends, which shows how often people enter a given search term compared to the total search volume, he compared "NFT" and "metaverse."
Remember how so many in commercial real estate thought they were important aspects of the future? There was the attempt to create a new type of real estate asset. Apartment marketers trying to look relevant and hip. Metaverse property you could buy and maybe not actually own. The collapse of metaverse "land" values.
If you look at the five-year scale comparison of the interest over time, NFT started in a noticeable way in January 2021 and metaverse started in mid-April. The NFT search term hit peak interest, represented by an indexed popularity score of 100, in late January 2022. In comparison, metaverse only had a peak popularity that was about a quarter of the top NFT score. Neither of them disappeared from interest, but by late July 2024 they were at a relative minimum.
Perhaps the fall-off in interest meant people no longer had questions about the terms and understood them completely. However, look at the term iPhone. It has a baseline of 50, about half its top popular, with periodic spikes between 80 and 100. Searches for iPhone never disappeared, even though it is thoroughly well known and understood.
More likely for NFT and metaverse is that they received a typical dose of technology popularity, bubbling up in hype and within a couple of years falling out of interest.
Now look at ChatGPT as the search term in question. It first starts in the week of November 27 to December 3, 2022. The popularity starts growing in waves, with a peak of 20 in mid-December 2022, a crest of about 70 in late April 2023, down to 48 in late July, up to 83 in the week of November 26 to December 2, a plunge to 49 at the end of December, 86 in mid-March 2024, down to 71 in late March, 100 in early June, then down to between 70 and 76 up to July 27.
Could ChatGPT, as a momentary placeholder for generative AI, be past an extended hype wave? Yes. Could it rebound to an even higher popularity? Absolutely. Something in between? That to.
The point, though, is that the popularity of technology can become many things, including irrelevant in the case of NFT and the multiverse. While not assuming that technology can never establish an ongoing existential popularity, it can also drop off quickly. Something to keep in mind when deciding what current trend will completely transform everything in CRE.
Source: GlobeSt/ALM