The AI Bubble Chart That Broke the Internet — And What It Gets Right (and Wrong)
A single image has been making the rounds on LinkedIn, X, Reddit, and Threads over the past few weeks. You've probably seen it: a massive grid of 2,500 dots — each one representing roughly 3.2 million human beings — color-coded by their level of AI engagement. The vast sea of grey represents the 84% of humanity that has never touched a chatbot. A modest band of green at the bottom shows the ~1.3 billion free users. Then a thin sliver of yellow for the 15–25 million people paying $20/month. And finally, a tiny cluster of red dots for the 2–5 million using coding scaffolds like Cursor, GitHub Copilot, or Claude Code.
The message is stark: if you're reading about AI, debating AI, building with AI — you're in a vanishingly small minority. The "AI revolution" everyone keeps talking about? It hasn't reached most of the planet.
The chart originated from Damian Player on LinkedIn, was picked up on Reddit, and then went properly viral when accounts on X with hundreds of thousands of followers started reposting it. Within days it was being reshared by real estate agents in Budapest, AI influencers in San Francisco, and content strategists in São Paulo — all with their own spin.
But is it accurate?
What the data actually says
Let's start with the numbers that hold up well.
The "never used AI" majority. The chart claims ~84% of the world's 8.1 billion people have never used generative AI. This is broadly consistent with what we know. As of early 2026, ChatGPT — by far the dominant platform — reports somewhere between 800 million and 900 million weekly active users. Add in Google Gemini, Claude, DeepSeek, Copilot, and smaller players, and you might reach 1–1.5 billion people who have used a chatbot at least once. That leaves the overwhelming majority of humanity on the outside. Pew Research found that only 34% of US adults have ever tried ChatGPT — and that's in one of the most tech-saturated countries on Earth.
The paying users. The chart estimates 15–25 million people pay $20/month for AI. This is surprisingly well-calibrated. OpenAI's COO confirmed ChatGPT has over 10 million Plus subscribers. Add in Claude Pro, Gemini Advanced, Perplexity Pro, Midjourney, and other paid tiers, and 15–25 million is a defensible estimate — maybe even conservative. That's roughly 0.3% of the global population.
The coding scaffold users. The 2–5 million figure for people using AI coding tools is harder to verify but feels plausible. GitHub Copilot had about 1.8 million paid subscribers by mid-2025. Add Cursor, Windsurf, Claude Code, Replit, and other AI-native development environments, and you're likely in the low single-digit millions.
Where the chart oversimplifies
The visualization is powerful precisely because it simplifies. But that simplification has some costs.
It ignores passive AI exposure. Hundreds of millions of people use AI daily without knowing it — through search results shaped by AI Overviews, social media feeds curated by ML algorithms, auto-generated email replies, and recommendation engines. The chart only counts conscious, direct interaction with chatbots.
The categories aren't mutually exclusive or exhaustive. Where do Midjourney users fall? What about someone who uses AI through Microsoft Copilot at work but has never opened ChatGPT directly? Many people interact with AI through embedded tools in products they already use — Notion AI, Canva's Magic tools, Adobe Firefly — without fitting neatly into either bucket.
It treats "never used AI" as a single monolith. There's a big difference between a farmer in rural Madhya Pradesh who has never heard of ChatGPT and a German office worker who has heard about it constantly but hasn't bothered trying it. Their paths to adoption — and the business opportunities they represent — are completely different.
Why this chart resonates anyway
Despite these caveats, the chart has clearly struck a nerve — and for good reason. It punctures a very specific illusion that's common in the tech and AI world: the feeling that "everyone" is using this stuff.
If your social feeds are full of people discussing prompt engineering, agentic workflows, and which model is better at code review, it's easy to believe the whole world looks like that. It doesn't. Not even close.
For builders, founders, and consultants like me, this is actually the most important insight: the market isn't saturated. It hasn't even started. The mobile app market crossed $330 billion in revenue in 2025 and is on track for $633 billion by the end of 2026. And most of the growth is coming from markets — India, Brazil, Indonesia, Nigeria, Vietnam — where AI adoption is still in its infancy.
The people who will build the biggest businesses in AI over the next decade aren't necessarily the ones building the most sophisticated tools for other AI power users. They're the ones who figure out how to make AI useful for the other 84%.
The echo chamber problem
There's a deeper point here that the chart only hints at. The people discussing AI most intensely online — on X, LinkedIn, Hacker News, Reddit — represent a fraction of a fraction of the global population. We're talking about maybe 2–5 million people in what you might call the "AI discourse bubble."
When someone in this bubble says "AI is everywhere," they mean: AI is everywhere in my world. And when they say "the market is crowded," they mean: the market is crowded for the tools I personally use and the audience I personally belong to.
Step outside that bubble, and most businesses still manage their operations on spreadsheets. Most professionals have never written a prompt. Most of the world's work is still done the way it was done five years ago.
That gap — between the intensity of the AI conversation and the reality of AI adoption — is where the real opportunities live.
What I take from this
As someone who builds digital products and works with businesses on strategy, this chart is both humbling and energizing. It's a reminder that the technology I work with every day is still exotic to the vast majority of people and businesses. It's also a reminder that the early-adopter advantage is real and enormous — if you're reading this, you're probably in the top 1% of AI literacy worldwide.
The question isn't whether AI adoption will grow. It will. The question is who will build the bridges between the red dots and the grey ones — and how.
Sources: Damian Player / LinkedIn (Feb 2026) · OpenAI via Reuters, Backlinko, DemandSage · Pew Research Center · Alice Labs / Eurostat / OECD · GitHub / Microsoft earnings
