What in the Worldcoin?

In the first of a new series for ‘What Did OpenAI Do This Week?’, Deeper will be looking…um…deeper(!) at where Sam Altman and co are spending their time outside of OpenAI and how it all fits together. First up is Worldcoin. Become a paid subscriber to get the full analysis of the inner workings of OpenAI and where else they are paying attention.

Owned by Tools for Humanity, and co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Alex Blania; Worldcoin is a blockchain identity project that offered people cryptocurrency tokens to let the Worldcoin Orb (see below) scan their irises in order to create a unique identifier for each person which, Altman and co say, is more secure than emails and password. Others dispute that last part and some regulators (UK) are already taking issue with how data is collected by the bowling ball sized/weighted device.

The rationale behind the company is simple; AI is going to disrupt humanity (positively and negatively), but a major issue will be the inability to tell a real person from a computer. Worldcoin seeks to put a stopper in that massive dam breach by creating a “proof-of-personhood” system so that humans can prove that they actually are humans, and (ii) giving everyone a UBI. Something that Ethereum’s CEO believes will take years to work.

Worldcoin wants to scan everyone’s eyes to create IDs and the process is simple enough, but how it will get there — and has gotten there — is anything but simple and in some cases legit. To date, Worldcoin has orbed over…

For the full post you need to be a paid subscriber to ‘What Did OpenAI Do This Week?’. Sign up now/today to get the bias-free OpenAI 101 handbook, access to the full WDODTW archive and the weekly newsletter sent directly to your inbox.