New gold in the Wild West of Tech: Artificial intelligence is the buzzword just a year after the metaverse, whose ashes are videogame avatars.

Remember the metaverse? For those whose memories are short, the metaverse is the virtual world in which we are supposed to interact, wearing expensive virtual-reality headsets and representing ourselves via avatars, our virtual doubles. It was the new big thing, swore Mark Zuckerberg, the king of social networks, who went so far as to rename his empire after the concept, calling it Meta Platforms  (META) - Get Free Report. Maybe he should have listened to those pointing out that word "Meta," transliterated here from the Hebrew, means "she died." Bad omen.The metaverse wave in 2022 poured furiously into the business world and markets, to the point that many companies felt forced to announce so-called projects for the concept, even if that meant just buying a virtual space.A year later the metaverse is a distant memory and billions of dollars in investments have gone up in smoke. Investors who have bet on certain firms have lost almost everything.But as one buzzword chases the other, a new craze has been setting the business world on fire: artificial intelligence, aka AI. This is the new conquest of the West, the new El Dorado.