Internet only became a fad once it was already large and had tens of millions of users.

I remember the pre-Web days of Usenet and BBS and no one thought those were trendy.

AI is far more akin to crypto.

Lots of people talk about crypto yet almost no one uses it.

Pretty much everyone I know uses AI for something.

That might be a perspective thing. I can think of three people in my life who have used AI at any point, and two of the three used it for diffusion models right when Stable Diffusion was first released.

More like the dot-com bubble