Sam Altman, Co-Founder Of Worldcoin, Believes Proving Your Humanity Is The Next Big Thing In AI

There is nothing new about fake virtual identities. With the ease with which they can be created, social media platforms have been able to gain a larger audience — more users — and they have been a scourge, being tied as they are to the spread of conspiracy theories, distorted discourse, and other societal ills as a result.

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While Twitter bots do exist, they are nothing compared to the kind of world we are about to enter, as anyone who has spent time using ChatGPT can attest to. Several years from now, it will be impossible to tell whether someone is communicating with another mortal or a neural network.

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Sam Altman is aware of this. In addition to being the co-founder and CEO of ChatGPT's parent company OpenAI, Altman has had more visibility into what's around the corner in the past than most others. More than three years ago, he conceived of the idea of creating a new company that could serve as proof of one's personhood in the first place. Worldcoin has a three-part mission — which is to create a global ID, a global currency, and a mobile app that enables payments, purchases, and transfers by using its own token, as well as other digital assets as well as traditional currencies — that is as ambitious as it is technically difficult. However, the opportunity to succeed is also huge.

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In broad strokes, here's how the company, still in beta and based in San Francisco and Berlin, works: First, users must download the app, then scan their iris with a silver orb the size of a melon that houses a custom optical system, before using the app to access the service. A unique cryptographic "hash" or equation is created when the scan is completed, and the individual is added to a database of verified humans, and Worldcoin creates a unique "hash" that is tied to that specific real person. There is no need to save the scan, but the hash can be used in the future to prove to a third party that the person is who they claim to be anonymous, as it includes a private key that leads to a public key that can be shared. Because the system is designed to verify that a person is actually a unique individual, if a person wishes to accept payment or fund a specific project, the app generates a ‘zero-knowledge proof’ — or a mathematical equation — that allows the individual to provide only the necessary amount of information to a third party. This is because the app is designed to verify that the individual is actually a unique individual. We might even be able to use the technology one day to allow people to vote on how AI should be governed in the future.

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Almost as soon as Andreessen Horowitz, Variant, Khosla Ventures, Coinbase, and Tiger Global were able to reveal their plans for investing in Altman's startup, investors jumped at the opportunity to fund the outfit. The funding came from Andreessen Horowitz, Variant, Khosla Ventures, Coinbase, and Tiger Global. The public, on the other hand, has been more cautious. Many people questioned Altman's promise of giving a share of its new currency, Worldcoin, to anyone who agreed to scan their iris in June 2021 when Bloomberg reported that Altman was at work on it. The developers of Worldcoin said that they needed to be decentralized from the start, in order to be able to roll out future currency drops in the context of universal basic income programs in the future. Worldcoin believes that the crypto component is essential from the point of view of the company. The nascent startup was soon deemed another crypto scam, while others questioned whether such a startup could really guarantee the privacy of its participants by collecting biometric information.

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Altman later said the press owed to a “leak” and that Worldcoin wasn’t ready to tell its story in 2021. Now, reorganized under a new parent organization called Tools for Humanity which calls itself both a research lab and product company, the outfit is sharing more details. Whether they’ll be enough to win over users is an open question, but certainly, more people now understand why proving personhood online is about to become essential.

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Everything everywhere all at once

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It was in 2019, as Altman was leaving famed accelerator Y Combinator to become the CEO of OpenAI that he began interviewing people to lead a new organization he’d begun imagining. The first founder he brought into the fold, Max Novendstern, was a former investment associate at Bridgewater Associates and worked previously for a money transfer startup called Wave; the second founder who Altman brought on, Alex Blania, had been studying theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology and the Max Planck Society.

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Novendstern had already started a new business by the time 2021 started rolling around. In the end, Blana stayed on to become the CEO of Worldcoin.

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In the wake of Novendstern's departure, Blania told Trade Algo recently that Novendstern has "just incredible zero-to-one skills, he's incredibly creative", but that he is not as operationally sound as the company needs at this juncture. During this time, Altman has told Trade Algo that while he isn't "day-to-day involved", he believes in Blania's 120-member team, which is collectively aiming to create the "largest financial and identity system in the world, which will also preserve privacy, be inclusive and fully secure."," says Blania.

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The task is daunting. The outfit claims that it has 1.2 million users at the present time, but in order for it to be truly effective, it needs more than a billion users, including people who are resistant to the idea of biometric technologies and things related to cryptography.

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Altman, who is still on the Worldcoin board of directors, is aware that it will be a difficult road to conquer. In January, he spoke at an evening. He told the audience that he believes that the need for systems that demonstrate personhood is growing as artificial intelligence develops, as is the need for new experiments on wealth redistribution and global system governance. However, he also referred to Worldcoin as a kind of experiment that he is “very glad” is taking place.

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Further to this, Altman also acknowledged that while privacy concerns surrounding Worldcoin were misguided, he also recognized that the same evening that these concerns might be insurmountable. "To me personally," he said, "the amount of privacy I'm willing to give up when I use Facebook or something versus the amount of privacy I'm willing to give up when I get a scan of my retina, and nothing else - I'd much rather take the latter course. There are many people who will not want that, which is fine with me. It would be great if we could experiment more with how we can solve problems with technology in this new world, and I think it would be fun to try stuff like that."

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The biggest hurdle for Blania in executing Worldcoin's early vision is getting enough people exposed to the "orbs" that are the company's core concept.

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There are currently orbs on campuses around the world, from Kenyan universities to Lisbon shopping malls, according to Blania. Although it takes just 60 seconds for one to capture a high-definition iris scan at the moment, penetration of the orbs is far from where it should be.

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Blania explained that Worldcoin intends to solve this problem and that in Lisbon, for example, where "less than 5%" of people have had their irises scanned, users may eventually receive coupons or "access to certain loans" or even single-player games in return for taking iris scans, which could encourage more people to take the time to do so.

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It has been suggested by Blania that the rapidly changing nature of the internet will be a bigger driver of adoption. “It is a very long road that we have to walk down, and yes, it is going to take quite a while for us to make it," he explains. “In a year's time, it won't only be 'people' on Twitter who are offering scammy crypto giveaways" that are recognizable straightaway as bots that will offer scammy crypto giveaways on Twitter. “Suppose instead that you spend 10 hours a day on the internet and after you close your laptop, you have no idea if maybe you talked for five hours to neural networks of different forms and shapes and wasted your time as a result. It will be a terrible experience.”

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Worldcoin, on the other hand, is also embarking on an enterprise strategy that could be the most promising, and most lucrative, way for Worldcoin to gain traction in the near future. As a matter of fact, a spokesperson for the company told me that Worldcoin is about to release an SDK so that developers can program to its API and integrate its tech into their own apps and platforms. This SDK will allow developers to verify that users are humans and ensure that a particular action can only be performed once by the user.

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Stranger at the gate

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There are a number of applications that could be developed for WorldCoin over time - assuming all goes according to plan. There is a report that Chris Dixon of Andreessen Horowitz once said to Blania: "This is super interesting tech, but I don't think you quite realize what a big deal it really is."

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However, critics continue to be skeptical about the company's lofty goals and its technology, despite its lofty ambitions. Possibly one of the biggest questions at this point is how people will be able to use the actual Worldcoin currency once it is provided to them, and at this point, Blania does not have a very satisfactory response to this question. "Due to regulatory considerations as well as the fact the token is not intended to be available in the United States, I am not in a position to speculate on how the token might possibly be used," he adds.

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In terms of those who are skeptical about the potential of cryptocurrencies to help boost financial inclusion or enable universal basic income, Blania argues that critics are overly focused on the cryptocurrency of Worldcoin instead of the complementation of its products to validate people as unique and enable them to conduct transactions, such as sending and receiving funds.

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Meanwhile, the biometric authentication process is a one-time process, so Worldcoin's approach does not maintain a link between users and their World IDs. Blania acknowledges that there is no perfect system, and that "it will never be possible to completely prevent this," but he argues that the impersonation of keys generated by Worldcoin will become very difficult in the near future. He concludes by stating that "we expect impersonation to become very difficult in the near future."

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Worldcoin, as with any startup, has a number of challenges to overcome, and Worldcoin is no different - it definitely has a number of its own competitors. As for Blania's assessment of this issue, he believes that over a period of time, entrants who take a different approach to proving personhood will naturally fall away.

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Because of the rapid evolution of the online world, Worldcoin's orbs give the company an advantage over online platforms that try to solve the same problem fully online. Ultimately, says Blania, they're going to be ripped apart by the next generation of [large language] models [like ChatGPT] coming out in the next 12 to 24 months, since neither digital content nor intelligence will be good enough to differentiate [who is and isn't human]. “There will need to be something that ties the virtual world to the real world,” he explains. “The rest will fall apart."