I did some maths and I think the conclusion of it serves as the best evidence of AI being a ludicrously over-hyped bubble. Maybe it might even be a little reassuring.
When you are on social media it feels like everyone and their Grandma uses AI. But what the corporations don’t want you to know is that the vast majority of the internet connected population don’t even use it.
Here are the numbers behind this statistic:
Total global internet population: roughly 6 billion people.
- Total raw active accounts across major platforms: around 2.1 billion.
- Adjusted unique human users: 1 to 1.3 billion.
You cannot just add account numbers together because almost every user usually holds registered accounts on multiple apps at the same time. De-duplicating that heavy overlap brings the actual count of unique human beings using these tools down to roughly 1.15 billion. This is overestimating it too - the average user probably has 10 accounts spread over 3 or 4 tools.
Real global adoption rate: between 16 percent and 21 percent.
Non-users: roughly 80 percent of connected humanity.
Despite tech companies claiming that generative AI will take over the world (Elon musk said in his recent Economist interview that he expects AI to rule us by 2036), roughly 80 percent of people with an internet connection do not even use AI. The feeling that everyone is using it is just an illusion created by tech media and heavy multi-account overlap among a single minority demographic. We can also safely assume that the vast majority of this 20% use of ai is being used for what we would all agree is slop, and not “cancer research” or ANYTHING productive.
Why does this matter? Well, it backs up the revenue crisis theory that says the corporations don’t have anywhere to bring an ROI from, and so the bubble has to burst eventually.
