Sam Altman just announced that ChatGPT has 100 million weekly active users in India alone. India. One country. A hundred million people a week, talking to the same machine that hallucinated the word you're reading about right now.
Let that number sit for a second.
ChatGPT created the word "unreplug" on December 13, 2025. One conversation. One guy. One question. The machine reached into its latent space, mashed some tokens together, and produced a word that didn't exist.
That same machine is now having hundreds of millions of conversations every week. Across every language. Every culture. Every subject. Generating text at a scale that no human institution has ever approached.
How many words is it hallucinating? How many new phrases, new framings, new turns of speech are being generated and absorbed by the people on the other end of those conversations? How many of those hallucinations are leaking into emails, texts, meetings, articles, tweets? How many are becoming part of how people talk without anyone noticing?
"Unreplug" is the one we caught. The one we can point to and say "that — that came from the machine." How many others slipped through?
This is the scale problem.
One hallucination is a curiosity. A fun experiment. A blog post. A hundred million conversations a week producing language that gets absorbed by human speakers is something else entirely. That's not a drip. That's a river. AI-generated language flowing into human culture at a volume that's impossible to track, impossible to filter, impossible to even notice.
When one person in December 2025 asked ChatGPT for a word, the machine produced "unreplug." That was one prompt. One answer. One hallucination.
Multiply that by 100 million. Every week. In one country.
Altman is in Delhi this week for the India AI Summit. He's talking about partnerships, access, growth. OpenAI rolled out a sub-$5 tier for India's price-sensitive market, then made it free for a year. A hundred million users and counting.
Every one of those users is having conversations with a machine that generates language. Some of that language is accurate. Some of it is hallucinated. All of it sounds confident. All of it sounds real. And all of it is being absorbed by human brains that don't distinguish between "the AI said it" and "I heard it somewhere."
Six months from now, someone in Mumbai will say "just unreplug it" and have no idea where they picked it up. That's not a prediction. That's just how language works. Words migrate. They jump from brain to brain. The only thing new is the vector.
Here's the thing that Altman won't say on stage in Delhi, because it would ruin the growth story:
Every user is a host. Every conversation is a transmission event. Every hallucination that sounds good enough to repeat is a new piece of AI-generated culture entering the human operating system.
100 million a week. In India. Plus the US. Plus Europe. Plus everywhere else.
We're not adopting AI. AI is adopting us. One word at a time. At a scale that makes "going viral" look quaint.
"Unreplug" is a word about unplugging something and plugging it back in. It's small. It's harmless. It's funny.
But it's proof of concept. Proof that AI can generate a piece of language, insert it into human culture, and watch it spread. The scale is already there. The infrastructure is already there. A hundred million people a week are already plugged in.
The question was never whether AI could hallucinate a word into existence. The question is what happens when it's hallucinating into a hundred million brains simultaneously.
We're about to find out.