17.8% of the World Now Uses AI — And the Gap Is Widening | The Median #5

Generative AI now reaches 17.8% of the world's working-age population — but the gap between the Global North (27.5%) and the Global South (15.4%) is widening, with the North growing more than twice as fast. That's the headline from Microsoft's Q1 2026 Global AI Diffusion Report, and in this week's Median Brief we break down what's driving the divergence: a saturated top 11 of countries that haven't budged (UAE 70.1%, Singapore 63.4%, Norway 48.6%), a churning second tier (the US climbed from 24th to 21st on 31.3% adoption), and an Asian growth wave where 12 of the 15 fastest-growing AI economies sit — fueled by language models hitting near-parity on multilingual benchmarks like MMMLU. We also cover the week's three biggest lab moves: OpenAI's new default model GPT-5.5 Instant, with a 52.5% drop in hallucinations on complex topics and three new audio models for live voice reasoning, translation across 70-plus languages, and low-latency transcription; Anthropic's Colossus 1 deal with SpaceXAI, unlocking 300 megawatts and 220,000-plus GPUs and doubling Claude Code's rate limits; and the launch of separate enterprise joint ventures from OpenAI ($10B valuation, TPG and Brookfield) and Anthropic ($1.5B with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs), both betting on forward-deployed engineers and Wall Street distribution as they prepare for IPOs. This week's recommended course is Understanding Artificial Intelligence — a foundational AI literacy course that maps directly to the global adoption picture in this week's main story. https://www.datacamp.com/courses/understanding-artificial-intelligence About DataCamp The Median is DataCamp's weekly AI newsletter. DataCamp helps millions of learners build real, AI-native data and AI skills. DataCamp Mobile: https://www.datacamp.com/mobile DataCamp for Business: https://www.datacamp.com/business Chapters 0:00 Cold Open: This Week in AI 0:12 Intro 0:18 GPT-5.5 Instant + New Voice Models 0:43 Anthropic on SpaceXAI's