Worldcoin, cofounded by Sam Altman, is betting the next big thing in AI is proving you are human

News Summary

  • Currently, the outfit says it has 1.2 million users; to be truly effective, it needs more than a billion more, including people resistant to the idea of biometric technologies and all things crypto-related.Altman — who remains on the board of Worldcoin — knows it’s a lot to overcome.
  • “To me personally,” he’d said, “the amount of privacy you give up to use Facebook or something versus the amount of privacy you give up for a scan of your retina and nothing else — I’d much rather have the latter.
  • Altman meanwhile has told me that he’s not “day-to-day involved” but thinks “super highly” of Blania’s now 120-person team, which collectively aims to create the “largest financial and identity system globally and make it fully privacy preserving and inclusive,” says Blania.It’s a tall order.
  • Yet some quickly deemed it another crypto scam, while others questioned whether a nascent startup collecting biometric data could truly secure its participants’ privacy.Altman later said the press owed to a “leak” and that Worldcoin wasn’t ready to tell its story in 2021.
  • When in June 2021, Bloomberg reported that Altman was at work on Worldcoin, many questioned its promise to give one share of its new digital currency to everyone who agreed to an iris scan.
  • 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.Everything everywhere all at onceAlex Blania.
Fake virtual identities are nothing new. The ability to so easily create them has been both a boon for social media platforms more users and a scourge, tied as they are to the spread of conspir [+10118 chars]