I dunno, I think literally millions of people have taken Andrew Ng's intro to ML.

Something like 11k papers were submitted to ICLR this year.

Not sure if those numbers are right but if so, you just cured my imposter syndrome (for today at least).

'Few tens of thousands' is for sure low. But if we talk in percentage of adult humans ... let's pull 1,000,000 out of thin air as the number who understood what that meant, that's 0.02% of adult humans.

An anecdote: recently, we mentioned ChatGPT to my partner's mother. She had never heard of it. Zero recognition.

Revel in your expertise, friend!

Sure, or at least close enough on the exact number for the point to remain valid. But that doesn't preclude ChatGPT doing it anyway — my CSS/JavaScript knowledge was last up to date some time before jQuery was released, and ChatGPT is helping me make web apps.

At least hundreds of thousands, likely millions

It’s the classic HN Dropbox comment, even 17 years on: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Maybe that would be more apt if this were web app rather than a 10s of lines training script