Comment by dlcarrier

You sent me down a rabbit hole, but apparently discussions of previous bubbles were quite large:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=tech+bubble%2C...

and

https://trends.google.com/explore?q=tech%2520bubble%2Creal%2...

Discussions of a bubble are always common in retrospect, so they peak after the bubble bursts. The Google Books data includes magazines and newspapers, but ends in 2022. The Google Search data is newer and closer tracks the interests of individuals than reporters and commentators, but has much lower precision.

The dot-com bubble burst in early 2000, but the term didn't exist at the time. It was called a "tech bubble" or "internet bubble", with usage of the two tracking similarly and "tech bubble" being far more dominant. The terms' usages peaked in 2007, but had already gained some prominence at the time of the bubble burst.

The real-estate bubble (really a real-estate lending bubble) burst in 2008 with the already strong usage of the term "real estate bubble" really accelerating at the start of 2005, and peaking in 2012.

Interestingly, usage of the term "tech bubble" started falling right when the real-estate peaked, perhaps with its prominence relegating the dot-com bubble to history.

Despite AI being an on-and-off overhyped buzzword since the 70's "AI buble", doesn't really show up in Google Books before the 2022 cutoff, which is also the year of the public release of ChatGPT, when LLMs quickly became a hot topic, but before there was enough hype for a bubble. Searches for "AI bubble" overtook "bitcoin bubble" at the start of 2023.

The growth in searches for "AI bubble" started accelerating last April, and report as peaking last November, although with the noisier data from Google Search, it may be a false peak. The AI bubble is itself a tech bubble, but with AI being the buzzword this time around, instead of the internet domains that ruled the last tech bubble. Searches for "tech bubble" are much lower than "AI bubble" but follow the same trend, with both showing a small peak in July, a dip in August, and a strong peak in November.