Fake virtual identities are nothing new. The ability to create them with such ease has been both a boon for social media platforms (more “users”) and a scourge, linked as they are to the spread of conspiracy theories, distorted speech, and other social ills.
Still, Twitter bots are nothing compared to what the world is about to experience, as any time spent with ChatGPT illustrates. Fast forward a few years and it will be impossible to tell if someone is communicating with another mortal or with a neural network.
Sam Altman knows it. Altman, famously, is the co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, parent of ChatGPT, and has long had more visibility than most about what’s around the corner. That’s why more than three years ago, he envisioned a new company that could serve first and foremost as a personality test. Called world currencyTheir three-part mission: to create a global ID, a global currency, and an app that enables payments, purchases, and transfers using its own token, along with other digital assets and traditional currencies, is as ambitious as it is technically challenging, but the opportunity is also enormous.
In broad strokes, this is how the team, based in San Francisco and Berlin, works: To use the service, users must download their application, then scan your iris using a silver, melon-sized orb that houses a custom optical system. Once the scan is complete, the individual is added to a database of verified humans, and Worldcoin creates a unique cryptographic “hash” or equation that is linked to that real person. The scan is not saved, but the hash can be used in the future to prove the person’s identity anonymously through the app, which includes a private key that is linked to a shareable public key. Because the system is designed to verify that a person is truly a unique individual, if the person wants to accept a payment or finance a specific project, the app generates a ‘zero knowledge proof’, or mathematical equation, that allows a the person provide only the necessary amount of information to a third party. Someday, the technology might even help people vote on how AI should be governed. (One piece at the IEEE Spectrum outlet better explain the details of Worldcoin technology.)
Investors eager to do business with Altman jumped at the opportunity to fund the team almost as soon as they imagined it, with Andreessen Horowitz, Variant, Khosla Ventures, Coinbase, and Tiger Global bringing him $125.5 million. But the public has been more cautious. When in June 2021, Bloomberg reported that Altman was working on Worldcoin, many questioned his promise to give a portion of his new digital currency to everyone who agreed to an iris scan. Worldcoin said it needed to be decentralized from the start so that it could offer future currency dips as part of universal basic income programs. (Altman has long predicted that the AI will generate enough wealth to pay each adult a certain amount of money each year). From Worldcoin’s perspective, the crypto piece was necessary. However, some quickly considered it another crypto. scamwhile others disputed whether a start-up company collecting biometric data could really ensure the privacy of its participants.
Altman then said that the press was due to a “leak” and that Worldcoin was not ready to tell its story in 2021. Now, reorganized under a new parent organization called tools for humanity Calling itself a research lab and product company, the team shares more details. Whether they will be enough to win users over is an open question, but certainly more people now understand why testing online personality is about to become essential.
Everything everywhere at once
Los Angeles and San Francisco Publicity Portrait Photographer Marc Olivier Le Blanc, Publicity, Editorial and Lifestyle.
It was in 2019, when Altman was leaving the famous accelerator Y Combinator to become the CEO of OpenAI, that he began interviewing people to lead a new organization that he had begun to imagine. The first founder he brought into the fold, Max Novendstern, was a former investment associate at Bridgewater Associates and previously worked for a money transfer startup called Wave; the second founder Altman brought in, Alex Blania, had been studying theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology and the Max Planck Society.
In early 2021, Novendstern went on to launch another startup. However, Blania stayed on and became the CEO of Worldcoin.
Blania recently told me of Novendstern’s departure that he is “just amazing, very creative” but “not as operational as the company needs to be” right now. Altman, meanwhile, has told me he’s not “involved in the day-to-day” but thinks “highly” of Blania’s team, now 120, who together aim to create the “most successful financial and identity system.” largest in the world and do it completely while preserving privacy and inclusive”, says Blania.
It is a difficult task. Currently, the team says it has 1.2 million users; to be truly effective, it needs over a billion more, including people who are resistant to the idea of biometric technologies and all things cryptocurrency.
Altman, who remains on the Worldcoin board, knows there is a lot to overcome. At an evening event I hosted in January, he told the audience that the “need for systems that provide proof of personality and the need for new experiments with wealth redistribution and global governance of systems” is growing due to developments in AI, but also called Worldcoin an “experiment” of the who is “very happy” is running.
Furthermore, while Altman suggested that privacy concerns around Worldcoin were misguided, he also acknowledged that same evening that they could be insurmountable. “For me personally,” he had said, “the amount of privacy you give to use Facebook or something versus the amount of privacy you give for a scan of your retina and nothing else, I would much rather have the latter.” . And a lot of people won’t want that, and that’s okay. But I think more experiments on what problems we can solve with technology in this new world, like, [it’s] great to try those things.”
With much more at stake in Worldcoin’s success than Altman, Blania seems intent on executing on the company’s initial vision, and one of the biggest hurdles to overcome is getting enough people in front of the “orbs” that are central to the approach. from Worldcoin.
Right now, the orbs are “everywhere, from universities in Kenya to shopping malls in Lisbon,” says Blania, who says it currently only takes 60 seconds to capture a high-definition iris scan, but penetration is some way off. from where it is needed. be.
Worldcoin has plans to solve this, Blania says, offering that in Lisbon, for example, where “less than 5%” of residents have had their irises scanned, users may eventually receive coupons or “access to certain loans” or even a single player. games, drawing more users to make time for an iris scan.
A bigger driver of adoption will be the changing nature of the Internet, Blania suggests. “It’s a very long road that we have to walk, and yes, it will take a while,” she says. “But even a year from now, it won’t just be ‘people’ on Twitter offering fraudulent crypto giveaways” who will be immediately recognizable as bots. “Instead, imagine you spend 10 hours a day on the internet and after closing your laptop, you have no idea if maybe you talked for five hours with neural networks in different ways and wasted your time. It will be terrible.
Meanwhile, Worldcoin is also embarking on a business strategy that could be the most promising and lucrative way for Worldcoin to gain momentum. In fact, a company spokesperson says that Worldcoin is about to release an SDK so that developers can program to your API and incorporate their technology into their own apps or platforms as a way to verify that their users are human and to ensure that a user can perform a particular action only once.
stranger at the door
And the applications for WorldCoin could continue to expand over time, if all goes to plan. Chris Dixon of Andreessen Horowitz reportedly he once told Blania, “This is super cool technology, but I think you don’t understand how important it really is.”
However, critics continue to doubt the lofty goals of the company and its technology. One remaining question is how people will use the actual Worldcoin they are given, and Blania doesn’t have a very satisfactory answer at the moment. “Due to regulatory considerations and the token not being intended to be available in the US, I am not in a position to speculate on how the token can potentially be used,” she says.
As for skeptics about the potential of cryptocurrencies to boost financial inclusion or enable universal basic income, Blania suggests that critics are too focused on Worldcoin’s cryptocurrency rather than how its products complement each other to validate the people as unique and then allow them to do things like send and receive funds.
Meanwhile, a more immediate concern about Worldcoin’s approach is that because biometric authentication is a one-time process, there is no continuous link between users and their World IDs. When asked if a Worldcoin-generated key can be sold or disposed of however people want, Blania first acknowledges that “no system is perfect” and that “it will never be possible to completely avoid this,” but adds that “we hope identity theft becomes very harsh.”
Regarding the competition, and Worldcoin has some — Blania hopes that participants who take different approaches to testing personality will naturally fade over time.
While Worldcoin’s orbs are “a bit out there,” he acknowledges, they do give the company an advantage over platforms trying to solve the same problem entirely online because of how quickly the online world changes. Says Blania: “I fundamentally believe that they are going to be torn apart by the next generation of [large language] Models [like ChatGPT] that are going to come out in the next 12 to 24 months, because neither digital content nor intelligence will be good enough to discriminate [who is or isn’t human] not anymore. You will need something to bridge the physical world,” he adds. “Everything else will break.”
