Buzz, the collective excitement surrounding a technology, is known to shape technological evolution by drawing entrants and capital toward a technology and making markets more receptive to its innovations. But these innovations must also pass non-market institutional gatekeepers, which decide whether a specific innovation meets set standards. How buzz shapes their judgment remains unknown. I argue that the answer depends on gatekeepers' expertise in the focal technology. Experts turn the attention that buzz brings into closer scrutiny of an innovation's technical soundness, and they may push back against its enthusiasm rather than rely on it, which makes their evaluations less favorable. Non-experts lack the knowledge to do either. I test this argument in patent examination at the United States Patent and Trademark Office, using AlphaGo's victory over Lee Sedol in March 2016 as a salient event that intensified buzz around artificial intelligence. The applications studied were filed before the event, so the innovations themselves were unaffected by the buzz, but they were first examined on either side of it. Relative to their own other applications, expert examiners raised about 14 percent more rejection grounds against AlphaGo-related AI applications after the event, while non-experts showed no comparable change. The increase centered on objections that claims did not clearly define what they covered, consistent with experts looking past the exciting label to question the claims' technical soundness. Buzz can thus shape technological evolution through institutional gatekeeping, so that the fate of a technology's innovations depends on when and by whom they are judged.
Keywords: buzz; institutional gatekeeping; nonmarket selection; technological evolution; expertise; patent examination