Sam Altman’s lesser-known crypto project wants to scan the world’s eyeballs
here.
New York
CNN
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If the AI that Sam Altman is building works, it'll eventually break the global economy (in a good way, he hopes). And when that happens, he's got another project, Worldcoin, in the works to help fix it.
Through OpenAI, the privately owned company behind ChatGPT, Altman is pursuing the holy grail of tech, known as artificial general intelligence, or AGI, which he believes will be "the best tool humanity has yet created."
Let's play along for a moment and take him at his word: It's 2034, and AGI has freed us all from our cubicles to live a life of leisure, safe from pre-AGI headaches like disease and war. We eat grapes and write poetry or … binge Netflix and gossip. Heaven!
(And just for today, I'm going to resist my urge to pontificate about the inevitability of human struggle, or what it means to experience pleasure without its opposite.)
Taking even the most optimistic view of what AGI will do to the world, there's an unavoidable problem that when the bots become smarter than us, it'll be hard to tell who's a bot and who's a human. Right now, our best line of defense are those annoying CAPTCHA puzzles, and bots are already figuring out ways around them.
That's the problem that Worldcoin is trying to solve. Trouble is, the solution sounds super dystopian.
It goes like this: To ensure everyone's essential humanness online, the company uses biometric data to create a digital passport of sorts, called World ID, that can't be replicated by bots. To do that, it's using its proprietary, basketball-ball sized "orbs" that scan people's eyeballs and create a unique, immutable code based on the pattern of their irises.
(I know!)
Once the orb scans an iris, it converts the image into a numerical code that becomes part of your encrypted, anonymized digital ID.
According to the company, the iris is the only biometric measure that's sufficiently unique to identify all the humans on the planet. Worldcoin insists it doesn't store any personal information, and the orbs immediately delete the images after verification.
Longer term, those digital IDs would form the basis for a system of universal basic income, in which everyone might be doled out installments of Worldcoin's own cryptocurrency.
This is the kind of audacious Silicon Valley plan that's easy to mock at first glance. But it's also catnip to billionaire VCs like Andreesen Horowitz, one of Worldcoin's backers.
Like most of you, I had a lot of questions. So I sat down (virtually) with Worldcoin's co-founder and CEO, 30-year-old Alex Blania, to discuss the project's origins and future.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
CNN: I am curious to hear the cocktail-party version of what Worldcoin is.
Worldcoin CEO Alex Blania: We are trying to create the largest financial and identity network on the planet and the internet, and we do so by solving a long-standing problem, which is how to verify humanness.
But also by launching a digital currency, we're giving ownership in it to truly every human being.
The outcome should be much bigger than those two things independently, because it will create the largest network on the internet of that type.
CNN: It sounds like you're banking on two things happening in the near future: One, that AI becomes AGI and upends the global economy, and two, cryptocurrencies can be ready to replace the global financial network.
Blania: I actually don't think so. It's not that we hope that, magically, somehow crypto will turn out to be widely adopted and we can piggy bank on top of that, rather we hope that we can make the change.
And on AGI, we believe that that trajectory is happening … We already are in a situation where all the destiny is in our hands, and I think we just need to make it happen. And if we make it happen, it is one of the most ambitious projects of our time, period. But of course there's a lot of risk around it.
Alex Blania, co-founder of Worldcoin, in Singapore last year.
Joseph Nair/Bloomberg/Getty Images
CNN: What kind of risks do you mean?
Blania: It's not just one big thing anymore, it's many small things.
First, I think it's the overall execution of things we have in our control, how to build a product, how to roll it out, how to hire the right people, all of those things.
Second is probably narrative. You hit on multiple things all at once that are somewhat either complicated or controversial. But, just coming back from Asia was very interesting, because in Japan, for example, crypto is not a controversial thing at all. So you need to communicate it very clearly, it's not a homogeneous problem.
I think number three is probably how to make governments and regulators understand what we do and why it matters.
CNN: Speaking of governments, you've had some regulatory setbacks over the last year. (Worldcoin was blocked in Spain, had its office raided in Hong Kong, and faced inquiries from several other governments.) How are you adjusting your approach now?
Blania: We've also had a lot of very big wins. We signed an MOU [memorandum of understanding] with Malaysia, which I think is a really big deal, there's not many crypto projects that have achieved something like that.
In general, I think we got much, much better at it. Before we even launch in a country, we talk to the government extensively.
With the US, as you know there's a lot of regulatory uncertainty around crypto, and so we decided, as sad as it is, to not operate in the United States until that clarity is given.
CNN: A lot of Worldcoin's focus is future-focused, targeting problems that are hard for us to imagine today. Can you explain why a person like me, a regular person on the internet, should sign up for a World ID?
Blania: At face value, it can sound like a kind of cute little problem of "we have bots on X." But I think it is actually quite a fundamental shift that happened with the launch of ChatGPT. And so we will clearly need a way to protect and verify humanness in many online spaces, and this is a first step.
There's suddenly other entities that coexist with us online that will be indistinguishable from from other people. And they might be very smart and very good. [But] certain goals might be misaligned with what society broadly wants.
The other answer is, I actually think the most important companies of our time don't start by solving a problem, but rather they start by creating a future that we want to see. Like, SpaceX, OpenAI. What problem does AGI solve in the immediate, is very hard to state.
For us, the initial starting point was somewhat mechanical. It was like, OK, how would the world look if such a network would actually succeed? How would it change it?
CNN: You've talked about having some concerns about the existential risks of AGI. That's something that I think about a lot, too, and I'm wondering how you think about your work as it relates to the risk, even if it's a remote risk, of, like, destroying everything?
Blania: I think the upside of it is drastically bigger.
I hope that in 100 years, looking back, this looks like a medieval age. I think AI has this massive potential of giving everyone basically free and immediate access to the best health care, and drastically accelerating the biggest fields of science and technology.
I think it is clear that there is a path to build AGI in a safe manner, and as long as we do that, I think that the value to society is so outsized that it justifies a lot of things in the short term or midterm thatrequire changes or face disruption. Every new technology has some potential bad outcomes that come with it.
CNN: How would you put someone at ease over the idea of scanning their iris?
Blania: I think there's two pieces to that. One is us actually explaining what it is and how it works and why it's not threatening.
It's not any different than using Face ID. And in fact, it can even be superior to something like your face.
I think it's similar to the initial outcry when Apple did it, it was seen as this wildly outrageous thing to do. And now it's just like a normal part of life.
