The past two years have been eventful for Sam Altman, founder and CEO of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI. But that hasn’t stopped the AI giant from continuing to work on his many side projects, including Worldcoin, an obscure business dedicated to identifying people. Worldcoin’s main product is a digital passport that stores an individual’s biometric data known as the World ID. Last month, Altman announced a number of updates that will see the development of various features that support the “human proof” function of the business.
Worldcoin was founded in 2019 and went public last year as a project from Tools for Humanity, a startup founded by Altman and Alex Blania, a former deep learning researcher at Caltech. The company’s original goal was to use digital identification to distribute its crypto token, WLD, to all people as a form of universal basic income, an idea that Altman had been interested in for years.
In a future where AI is ubiquitous, Worldcoin wants to build tools that will help separate humans from bots.” “We started thinking about the infrastructure that society would need if AI really started to happen,” said Altman during the Worldcoin event last month. .
To that end, Altman and Blania announced at the event that Worldcoin will be renamed “World” going forward because the new name better embodies the project’s new goal of “accelerating everyone.”
How does Worldcoin work?
To verify a person’s identity, the World uses a product known as the ‘Orb.’ Round biometric devices scan a person’s eyes to collect unique iris data that becomes part of a person’s global ID. The business chose iris chips instead of traditional fingerprint or facial data routing because iris biometrics contain more unique information and are less susceptible to external change, he said.
The world recently unveiled the next-generation Orb, which is powered by Nvidia (NVDA)’s Jetson chipset and boasts five times better AI performance than the previous version. It also improves accessibility to Orbs, which will be available at prominent locations, self-service kiosks and can be ordered by individuals through an on-demand service.
Updates were also announced to World ID, which will now offer improved privacy features and a new feature known as Deep Face that will help users identify AI deepfakes in video calls such as FaceTime, WhatsApp and Zoom. Meanwhile, the new World App version of the project—which houses World ID—will now include a platform that allows third-party apps to run within the platform.
According to Altman and Blania, the Earth is in the midst of four steps on the road. After achieving the development of Orb and the blockchain network, it is currently working on scaling and will eventually face the fourth phase of redistributing the benefits of AI.
“We want to see what happens when we do this on a larger scale,” Altman said. Although the company has for years maintained its goal of reaching one billion users by 2023, it currently has only 15 million global ID holders. “It’s good that we’ve signed up more people, but we’re still 99.9 percent,” said an OpenAI executive.
