That's the thing. Every big thing has been misidentified as a fad.

But also you don't hear about that other 10 000 things that were called a fad and ended up being a fad.

Crypto might very well be a fad. At least only because of public misuse as an unregulated gambling market. It had potential to be great, but in my opinion, the in-between time of being a scammer's paradise has killed it for the near future.

There is pretty much no way "AI" is a fad. It won't replace everything, but integrating it into CAD tools, writing tools, and multimedia tools is pretty much inevitable.