The initiative, called Worldcoin, might have been written off as another techno-utopian job bound to fail had it not had one label attached to it: Sam Altman, the director and CEO of OpenAI, one of the most serious tech firms of the present time. When Altman began looking into individuality validation that could be used in universal basic income techniques, Worldcoin first got its start in 2019.
To make the idea a reality, he and tech Alex Blania worked together. They theorized that it would be crucial for a human to demonstrate they were not a app in a world of fast developing AI. The solution they came up with relied on people using iris-scanning technology to create personal tokens that would confirm their names around the world.
Worldcoin, therefore, is the best effort at technical solutionism: A human-grade Artificial earth that Altman is building might also be technologically regulated by a device that Altman has his fingers in.
Now, in an airy place in San Francisco’s Mission District, Altman and Blania presented their latest perspective for Worldcoin, then rebranded to the World Network, or World for little. The event included keynote presentations, new hardware, promises of expanded services, and hands-on (eyes-on? ) day with the new product, similar to an Apple function if the Apple creators had just returned from ayahuasca flee. ( The Wi-Fi password for the event: IntelligenceAge. )
All function attendees can have their iris scanned now, according to a spokeswoman for Tools for Humanity, and 500 participants will get a fresh Orb when it boats in 2025.
During the keynote address, Tools for Humanity key system official Rich Heley said,” We need more lights, lots of orbs, possibly one thousand more than we have today.”
This Orb is smaller than the previous edition, and white light. It’s running on Nvidia’s Jetson chipset and, according to Tools for Humanity, “provides almost 5X the AI effectiveness” for faster identification verification. None of this makes it less ridiculous.
Beginning in Latin America, the Orb will be available on-demand like a pie: Through a collaboration with the application Rappi, residents can have one show up at their door to test their iris and register for the World Network. The Orb finally makes its happy ending. ( Designer for Tools for Humanity, Thomas Meyerhoffer, claimed that no prior data can be found on an SD card delivered to a person’s door. )
World says it’s opening two Orb-scanning locations, in Buenos Aires and Mexico City. The Orb may also appear in your community part store or coffee shop, where you can add your latte to your iris scan. There are now 333 Orb locations worldwide and four areas in the US where you can “find your nearest Orb.”
This Orb technology is actually all that is needed to get your ears, a vessel of detectors and semiconductors. After that genetic information is captured, it goes into an application. This, quite obviously, raises concerns about data protection and storage. The user’s iris is scanned and stored in the World application, but Blun insists that it is encrypted and only kept on nearby devices when creating a World ID.
This World software and World community are what will drive Altman and Blania’s vision for the future of identity verification, and these software services have also received updates today. Several of them.
Initially, Altman and Blania claim to have expanded the World ID service’s functions to accommodate several hundred million certificates, a step away from the roughly 7 million World ID recipients who are already” Orb-verified,” which is a possibly unsettling neologism.
The company is launching a new feature called” Deep Face” ( a play on “deepfake” ) that it says will provide a new way to combat fraud. It will be appropriate with digital communication apps like FaceTime, WhatsApp, and Zoom. The software will indicate that someone who appears on a picture phone who purports to be you has been identity-verified through World.
WIRED questioned Blania about how the business intends to offer its Deep Mouth company, which would involve some form of facial recognition, while furthermore adhering to its fresh data privacy rules. He described a situation where a child’s World ID is kept and run directly on their Mac laptop and is used as a part of an app to operate over a movie chat when they log on and are using the device’s camera. But World still does n’t have any official partnerships with Apple, Meta, or Zoom for this solution, it just said the World app will” support” these processes.
World announced today that its bitcoin system, which is” the country’s first blockchain designed for people,” is now operational, which means that the several million World ID and World App people will be moved to this new, underlying bitcoin system.
While the biometric-scanning Orb and the World network have their roots in crypto tokens,” crypto” was n’t an oft-mentioned word during the event. Otherwise, Altman and Blania emphasized World’s bitcoin service, digital asset management, and online communication tools.
In the future, World hopes to create the “largest finance network” on the planet, according to Blania during the press briefing.
Blania claimed in a separate interview with WIRED that the pair were inspired by PayPal’s rise during regular Sunday gatherings at Atlman’s house. The World team saw themselves building out a similar network for tokens on a distributed network in a similar way to how Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, and others once pioneered digital payments and fundamentally changed online commerce.
The World app, for now, is free for everyone to use. It’s free to scan your eyeballs, too. Tools for Humanity itself is venture-backed, and the foundation, in its land grab for the modern identity verification market and your personal biometric data, is focused on scale, scale, scale. Eventually, it may make money through processing fees, Blania said.
Most of Tools for Humanity’s expansion plans for now are in locations outside of the US, due to murky regulations around crypto stateside, the organization’s spokesperson told me.
If you use the Orb and compatible app in the US, it will check and store your iris but wo n’t create a crypto token for you.
The Worldcoin project was exposed two and a half years ago because of allegedly deceptive and exploitative methods used to recruit people to scan their iris. Blania at the time attributed this haphazard behavior to the organization’s” startup” phase. In an interview with WIRED, Blania said the company is doing “like, a thousand things” to ensure a more rigorous consent process. Every market where World will be will have an “operational team” of staffing. He said there will be “explanations” in the World app for how the product works.
” And again, there is no data stored in any central place or anything”, Blania said.
In 2023, the service was also being investigated by the governments in Germany, Brazil, India, South Korea, and Kenya, over concerns about how it was storing and using biometric data. Kenya completely suspended Worldcoin enrollment. South Korea fined the company. Worldcoin suspended its own service in India, Brazil, and France.
Blania stated that Kenya’s perception of World will rekindle” sometime soon.”
Blania objected to the notion that the world was placing a higher priority on Latin America over other regions when asked about the focus on Latin America as a potential growth market through the partnership with Rappi for orbs-on-delivery.
” It’s just that we have limited resources, and there’s a natural sequencing happening”, Blania said. ” We are similarly focused on Asia and other places. Argentina has been a fast-growing market for us, for example, and we’re excited about that”.
” But the project is literally called World”, he added.
After the keynote address, Altman entered the press room and apologized for being unable to remain, before running away like a head of state.
