Sam Altman talks about Worldcoin: a combination with ChatGPT can be seen within ten years
Everything you want to know about Worldcoin is here.Source: Bankless Podcast
Translation by: 0x711, kaori, BlockBeats
On July 24, Worldcoin released an open letter signed by Sam Altman, announcing the official launch of WLD. The letter pointed out that since its establishment over three years ago, Worldcoin aims to create a new identity and financial network owned by everyone. Starting today, Worldcoin is being launched, and if successful, it will significantly increase economic opportunities, provide reliable solutions to distinguish between artificial intelligence and humans, while protecting privacy, promoting global democratic processes, and potentially showcasing a path to achieving a global basic income funded by AI (AI-funded UBI).
On the same day, the well-known crypto podcast Bankless released an interview video with Worldcoin co-founders Alex Blania and Sam Altman on May 14, which was also published on YouTube. The interview covered topics such as the vision of the Worldcoin project, the security and privacy of the Orb device, and the future development plans of Worldcoin. BlockBeats promptly translated and organized the interview content as follows.
1. Origin and Initial Concept of the Worldcoin Project
Bankless: Worldcoin is one of the most ambitious projects in the crypto space. The project has a token, a dedicated Layer 2 network, an identity protocol, and a mobile application. Of course, the most memorable is the iconic Worldcoin hardware—the silver Orb. The idea behind Worldcoin is that the best way to verify "humanity" is through biometric identification related to our unique DNA. Sam, can you talk about the origin of the idea for Worldcoin? Where did it come from, and why do we need Worldcoin?
Sam Altman: I was initially thinking that if you could have the largest network, say the largest imaginable financial and identity network, that would be a very powerful, truly global network. When we first started discussing this idea, I thought about how we could scan the palms of everyone in the world, and whether there were any other complex methods to verify identity.
The reason I am excited about this is that as the world moves towards powerful AI systems, I think it will be very important if we can do something that ultimately redistributes wealth—perhaps even access to these systems will one day be the most important component of wealth—and also protect privacy from a different perspective, which will become increasingly important as AI advances.
So, I started thinking about this many years ago, primarily driven by my work at OpenAI. At the same time, I thought UBI (Universal Basic Income) was a cool thing worth exploring. Although my ideas at the time were quite lacking, I still wanted to explore this area. Later, I met Max and Alex, and I thought Alex was outstanding. I will let Alex talk about how this project has come to where it is today, as he has played a significant role in it.
Bankless: So, can we say that Worldcoin was initially a project that aimed to achieve two goals at once? It combines UBI and identity verification, and you had already thought about achieving both goals before there was a practical solution, right?
Sam Altman: Yes, if you look at it from a higher perspective, it actually addresses the problem of verifying "humanity." That is the foundation of solving the problem; if there is a non-fraudulent solution that can do this while also protecting privacy, that would be perfect.
Bankless: Can we talk about how Sam and Alex met, when the idea for Worldcoin might have originated, and how Alex joined the project?
Alex Blania: We really started researching it in January 2020. I think Sam and Max had already been studying it for six months before that, but Max had a full-time job, and Sam obviously did too. So when I joined, we formed the founding team and then really started researching it. Before Worldcoin, I mainly studied theoretical physics and how to use deep learning to predict AI systems, so it wasn't closely related to crypto. I actually read about Bitcoin quite early, so I was somewhat of an early person in the crypto space, but I can't say I was very knowledgeable about crypto before Worldcoin. Later, Max emailed me with the then-current Worldcoin white paper and the initial ideas, which were very high-level concepts, and explained the importance of the project and where it might go. I drove to San Francisco, had several conversations with Max, then an interview with Sam, and after that, we spent more time together, and eventually, I became a co-founder of the project.
Bankless: Was Worldcoin a crypto project from the very beginning?
Alex Blania: Yes, I believe so.
Bankless: Sam, your initial concept was to scan palm prints, but Worldcoin did not do that. It chose iris scanning instead. Can you talk about that choice? Then we can start to delve into the technology inside the Orb.
Sam Altman: As Alex just mentioned, the initial concept of the project was centered around a paper. One major issue is that you basically need to solve the problem of civil resistance in order to distribute tokens to everyone. Why would you want to do this? Because it will incentivize a truly large network to grow to encompass all of humanity and genuinely guide this massive financial network. Of course, you can also distribute UBI in this way. So when you want to do this, you want to launch a token that benefits all of humanity, and the first big problem you need to solve is what is commonly referred to in the crypto space as civil resistance. I believe you are quite familiar with this. Simply put, it means that a person can prove to the network that they are indeed unique within that network. Why is this important? Because if you don't do this, what will happen? Bad actors will just undermine the entire token distribution mechanism, and everything will collapse. As you know, this still happens frequently in the crypto space today. If you really want to scale it to all of humanity, this is a bigger problem.
Clearly, this is one of the biggest problems we had to solve first. Then we conducted quite in-depth research. Most of the founding team came from Caltech or the Max Planck Institute, and we all have physics backgrounds. We researched the entire industry and came up with three viable options:
The first is KYC, using government citizen verification systems. But this option was immediately ruled out because less than half of the world's population has ID documents that can be digitally verified. Considering inclusivity, this option is not scalable. It may work very well in Europe and the US, but it doesn't work globally.
The second major direction is the so-called Web of Trust. Trying to establish a network based on trust relationships. This is a very idealistic concept but has never really been realized or scaled. However, I think this is something that Worldcoin could introduce in the future, and we can discuss it later.
The last option is biometrics. So we actually implemented demos of all three options. After careful consideration, we decided to go with the biometric approach. Before we discuss specific identification patterns, you first need to understand one thing: everything you use in your daily life, like an iPhone, is just re-authenticating you. It stores your facial features, and when you try to log in to the same phone again, it calculates a similar feature vector, and if it matches, you can use the phone. This is just a one-to-one comparison, which is relatively easy to implement. But to solve the problem of provable human uniqueness, you need to compare one user with all other users. This requires collecting more information about each user; otherwise, the fraud rate will grow exponentially, and you will actually hit a bottleneck. This is very important. The fraud rate is not a constant; you will suddenly hit a ceiling. Features like facial images do not have enough information entropy. Fingerprints also do not have enough information entropy. Theoretically, palm prints could, but there are no ready-made commercial solutions; the iris is key.
Bankless: You mean that facial images and similar information do not have enough "uniqueness" to conduct reliable natural person verification, right?
Sam Altman: That's right, at least if you're only using a regular smartphone camera.
Bankless: Okay, so when you were looking for ways to verify natural persons, you concluded that government IDs wouldn't work because that doesn't align with the principles of cryptocurrency. You also mentioned that the network trust model exists in the crypto world but is still quite experimental. Therefore, establishing a unique human identity, the biometric solution is the most reliable and mature model. That's why you chose iris scanning. I guess the information entropy of the iris is very high, at that magnitude, right?
Alex Blania: That's right, you are absolutely correct.
2. Technical Principles of the Orb
Bankless: So this also explains why Worldcoin exists in its current form and why the Orb hardware device is needed. If it relied solely on identity IDs from countries like the US or just used the network trust model, Worldcoin could only operate in the crypto space. But since we need to collect actual biometric information and correspond it with human DNA to determine uniqueness, we actually have to establish a real-world solution, which is why the Orb is needed. Can you briefly introduce the technical principles inside the Orb and how it does its job?
Alex Blania: As you summarized, the way this project changes the world is very important. Digital content (images or videos) and intelligent algorithms can no longer distinguish what is human. Therefore, you actually need to connect to the real world, and I believe this is the only way to solve this problem.
We started making the Orb very early on. We did a lot of engineering work and even designed custom cameras. The Orb has many sensors that can detect whether what we see is a real person or a display or AI trying to deceive us. All of this computation is done locally. So the first step is to confirm that the object is a human. Secondly, the eyes are captured, the unique encoding of the iris is calculated by a neural network, and then signed by the Orb device; this is the only information that leaves the device. This is very important and very cool: the uniqueness check is separated from the user's wallet, achieved through zero-knowledge proofs. In other words, we or anyone else can only prove whether a user has been verified before, without any other information.
I believe Worldcoin provides an option that makes it a privacy-protecting, open-source, and decentralized solution. So, I know it may sound counterintuitive at first because it involves biometrics, but if you really understand the engineering principles behind it, you will find that I believe there are actually no privacy issues that people are concerned about.
Bankless: Of course. I understand that iris scanning is an existing mature technology. As far as I know, most of the technology in the Orb is actually used to prevent humans from deceiving the Orb. It can scan your iris, which is its function. But most of the technology in the Orb is used to ensure that humans do not cheat during the iris scanning process. Can you explain the layers of technology included in the Orb?
Alex Blania: The Orb actually addresses two main issues, as you mentioned regarding anti-fraud. This can be broken down into two points: first, showing the device content that does not come from a real human; second, directly physically attacking the device itself. So you could directly access the processor and try to insert a data stream that does not come from imaging. That's the first point. The second point is imaging resolution. All the biometric devices we tested did not have sufficient resolution to scale to all of humanity. They do not have high enough resolution, which is why we had to make our own lenses and imaging systems, etc. This also took a lot of effort.
So I think both aspects required a similar amount of engineering effort. But regarding your question, the Orb has multispectral sensors that capture images at various wavelengths, such as infrared and 3D time-of-flight, to ensure that we are seeing a human. You can show a display or a more complex optical device to deceive it. This requires quite a bit of engineering to achieve. Then, a cool point is that all processing is done on the local device, so there are several neural networks performing all these checks in real-time. This is important for privacy protection.
3. How WorldCoin Addresses Privacy Issues
Bankless: One of the concerns about the WorldCoin project is privacy. Since you can prove a person is human by scanning their iris, how does WorldCoin address privacy issues?
Alex Blania: First, we agree on the seriousness of privacy issues. This is also why we were very cautious in designing WorldCoin. Indeed, biometric technology can seem unsettling at first glance. But if you really understand the engineering principles behind it, you will find that these concerns are actually unfounded. WorldCoin mainly addresses privacy issues from three aspects:
First, biometric data will not be stored. The image scanning is done on the local device, and the computation is also performed internally; ultimately, only the iris code signed by the Orb will leave the device. This code will be used to match against all users.
Second, and most importantly, through zero-knowledge proofs, the identity uniqueness verification is separated from the user wallet. This provides significant privacy protection.
Third, the entire setup is self-hosted. When users register, they will have a non-custodial wallet, and subsequently generate zero-knowledge proofs to prove they are part of the user group.
I believe there is currently no other solution that can address the same problem at this scale with almost zero privacy risk. Furthermore, all code will be open-source. Most of the hardware is already open-source, and the firmware code is gradually being opened up. The entire setup will also be completely decentralized, which certainly has its challenges, but we will achieve it. We have invested a lot of time and resources to build WorldCoin in this way.
Bankless: From a high-level understanding of this system, it seems there are many moving parts. The system includes the hardware inside the Orb, zero-knowledge cryptography, and the mobile application. Can you detail how a person verifies their identity through iris scanning, then converts that into data, and through a series of steps, transforms it into something that can be verified for login in their WorldCoin application? Can you talk about the data transmission, data processing in the iris scanner, and zero-knowledge proofs? Can you describe an end-to-end process from iris scanning to someone's phone?
Alex Blania: Okay, let me try to explain how this system works. A user interested in WorldCoin learns about it and downloads the World App (currently the only client for WorldCoin, but other wallets will support it in the future). The user looks for nearby Orb devices on the map and then appears in front of the device in person. During verification, the user clicks "Verify Now," generating two pairs of keys: one pair is the Ethereum wallet key, and the second pair is the identity wallet key. Both pairs of keys are stored on the user's phone.
During verification, the user shows the public key to the device. Then the Orb first performs a natural person check, followed by a uniqueness check, which involves capturing an image of the eye, calculating a unique feature code with a neural network, and signing it with a private key. The signed feature code is the only data that leaves the device and is sent to the backend server for verification (the backend will also be decentralized).
Afterward, when the user uses the World ID, they prove through zero-knowledge proofs that this public key has been included in the user set. This allows the user to use this proof across different ecosystems, not only on Ethereum but also bridging to other chains or using it for web logins, without disclosing any personal information.
Additionally, based on this concept of "natural person proof," WorldID is also an identity protocol that allows developers to attach other verifiable credentials, etc. So its functionality is not just limited to human verification. In summary, this is the entire process from eye scanning to the mobile end.
Bankless: Worldcoin does not ask for your name, date of birth, or address during the verification process, right?
Alex Blania: No, the only time this question might arise is when you are using deposit and withdrawal solutions, because in the application, there is also a non-custodial wallet, and you can withdraw through a deposit and withdrawal provider, who will ask for your name, but that is not us. In short, in the WorldCoin system, there is no need for your name, date of birth, address, or similar information.
4. The Intersection of Worldcoin and AI
Bankless: So we can say that Worldcoin provides a public address for humanity, right? And this address is derived from verifiable humanity. Sam, as one of the co-founders of WorldCoin, from the perspective of OpenAI, you would find that having a list of verifiable human addresses will be very useful in the AI era. So why will we need such addresses in the next decade or century?
Sam Altman: I think besides the reasons I just mentioned, there will be other reasons in the future. I think it is very important that in an era where AI is being developed as a tool for humanity, I believe the benefits that come from them will be many, such as access rights, governance rights, etc., which will belong to real humans. We really like many advantages of the WorldCoin solution. As Alex just explained, although the privacy perspective is different from what people previously imagined, I think it is a very appealing perspective. I also believe it is a very fair system. This could be the most inclusive system we can imagine.
Bankless: Alex, have you seen other use cases in the crypto space? Airdrops are another example, but since we do not have natural person proof, the distribution of tokens has been diluted.
Alex Blania: I started with cryptocurrencies first, and then we can broaden the scope a bit. I have been to many different countries and talked to many users in Latin America, Europe, and Africa. I think the crypto space can technically provide many financial primitives, but currently, for several different reasons, they have not been realized. One reason is user experience, but a bigger reason is that you need reputation to realize these functions. The concept of credit scoring, basically an on-chain credit score, so you can do low-collateral loans, I think that is a big concept that I hope will emerge soon. And natural person proof is the foundation of identity. It is not identity; the two are different because identity means I am a unique person, this is my name, that is my date of birth, or that is my GitHub account. So person proof is like the foundational building block that makes all these things happen.
Bankless: Sam, most people know you through OpenAI and ChatGPT. What specific ways do you see integrating OpenAI and WorldCoin together?
Sam Altman: I think it is still too early to talk about specific details, but as we observe this process over the next decade, I hope it will become apparent.
Bankless: How is the actual distribution of Worldcoin carried out? How does it reach people's hands? What does the distribution plan look like? How can I get WLD? How much can I get? What are the details?
Alex Blania: There are many details we cannot discuss here due to regulatory uncertainties in the US. So we won't go into the details here, but the overall mechanism is very simple. You download an app, verify through an orb, and then at some point, you get your natural person proof, after which you will receive WLD weekly. The entire system is built on this foundation, scalable to billions of people. This situation will continue for the next decade or so.
Bankless: Will there be incentives for early adopters of your Worldcoin ID?
Alex Blania: The entire process is not just about the Worldcoin ID. At launch, Worldcoin includes the three parts we have discussed: Worldcoin, World ID, and World Dapp. Worldcoin is a protocol aimed at scaling to all of humanity, which we have never seen before, as there has never been civil resistance. What will be more important in the next decade? Tokens or World ID? That is all unknown, as we have never seen a token held by 3 billion people.
Bankless: The Worldcoin project has many ambitious components. There is the orb, which is a hardware component, at the forefront of hardware itself. There is the token, which has its own cutting-edge distribution mechanism. There is the mobile application. There is also the actual scanning work. And we haven't even talked about the second layer built on the OP stack; there are many moving parts here. So what does it feel like to manage a startup that needs to achieve a very high level across so many areas?
Alex Blania: It has indeed been a crazy journey. Because I think people always forget that in the beginning, we actually only had four people. We had all just graduated from college, so we had never worked anywhere. Now it is a large team of 180 people, distributed across different fields, working together to achieve this goal. As you said, we have quite a mature hardware team, protocol team, economics team, and AI team. There is a lot going on, many moving parts. So it has definitely been quite an exciting experience. Then over time, it shifted from early hardware focus to product focus, and now it is focusing on operations. So it will become a massive operational machine.
Sam Altman: It is very cool to see the Worldcoin team perform in facing new challenges. One of my favorite things about startups is watching people learn how much work they can accomplish and how much they can do, especially for small teams. I don't remember who I first heard this from, but there is a somewhat famous saying in startups that if you knew how hard it would be, you would never start. So it is important to be a bit naive at the beginning. The things that a smart, motivated, and united small team can accomplish are far more than they realize. But even so, the Worldcoin team has certainly exceeded expectations.
Bankless: Sam, are you more involved in the day-to-day operations of the WorldCoin project? Perhaps not in the daily operations, but where are your touchpoints with WorldCoin?
Sam Altman: I will do my best to help wherever Alex needs it. But it seems to vary greatly; I will try to assist in any way I can.
5. Collaboration Between WorldCoin and Optimism
Bankless: WorldCoin recently announced that it will issue tokens on the Optimism mainnet. Please explain the reasons and significance of this decision in detail.
Sam Altman: Okay, actually what we announced last week is that the token itself will be issued on the Optimism mainnet. So we did not announce the OP stack Layer 2. We will certainly do our own Layer 2 at some point, but not at launch; that will come later this year. Why choose Optimism? In fact, over the past few months, they have given us a lot of feedback on the entire tech stack. Just two months ago, we decided we had to strengthen this and really start collaborating. Of course, it starts with migration, but it goes far beyond that. We will collaborate on identity primitives, and of course, it includes Base. So yes, there will be many things happening. So the simple implementation is to put WorldCoin on Optimism. That is the start.
Bankless: So WorldCoin will also use the Optimism chain for other infrastructure?
Alex Blania: Yes, the infrastructure of WorldCoin will also use the Optimism chain. So WorldID is completely independent because WorldID is essentially a Merkle tree that resides on the Ethereum mainnet, and then users can provide inclusion proofs for it. Then this will bridge to different ecosystems. So it is not just a matter of Ethereum. WLD will be issued on the OP mainnet, and then later this year, we will have our own Layer 2.
6. WorldCoin's Expansion Strategy
Bankless: So far, how many irises have been scanned? How many people have obtained WorldCoin IDs? What has been the strategy so far?
Sam Altman: Of course. So far (as of May 14), it is 1.7 million. All of this is just a start for us. So now there are 210 devices. Most of the time, there were only about 50 devices, mainly because we had to iterate on the product. Scale only matters after everything is launched. So we are only a few weeks away from launch, which is why we are discussing this now. What is the strategy? In the early stages of the project, the question was how many people would register when you show up in public with an Orb? Does this really work? Can you generate enough throughput with one of these devices to actually scale to billions? This was our initial definition of product-market fit and what scale we needed to achieve. So we made a prototype, and at that time, I was running around Berlin registering users with these devices. I remember one of my colleagues, Sandro, managed to complete 70 registrations in a day. With that 70 daily registrations, we completed our Series A funding at that time. Because if you take 70 registrations a day, multiply it by a week, then you get three times that; I mean, at that time it was 300 to 500 registrations a week. That means tens of thousands of devices would be enough to scale to billions. That was one of the very surprising things at the time. Since then, it has been like the early concept validation of the first phase. Then in the second phase, we globalized it. We had 15 devices, and we tried to deploy them in various markets around the world to understand if there were any fundamental barriers we were unaware of. So we started from Tromsø, Norway, where the capacitors exploded due to the cold, to Nairobi, Kenya, to Latin America, all of this was done during COVID. So it has been quite a winding journey. Some of our team members crossed five different countries to finally reach the country we really wanted to go to because of COVID. Recently, we now have O-Pacific, a team more specialized in this area. We are focusing on four markets: Buenos Aires in Argentina, Lisbon in Portugal, Nairobi in Kenya, and Bangalore and Delhi in India. These four markets are perfect launch platforms for larger regions. So if you want to build a product, these four areas are where we believe you should start. So we are basically dispatching product teams to settle in all four locations. I try to visit them as much as possible, and we will expand from there.
Bankless: You can't hire every Orb operator to cover the entire global population, right? So how do you spread the Orb around the world so that operators can use it? Do you hire every Orb operator? What is the strategy here?
Alex Blania: No, Worldcoin actually has to become a decentralized protocol. So this is not a strategy. The way it works is that when you operate an Orb, you earn revenue from the protocol for each registration. In addition, there are many incentive mechanisms.
Bankless: Is the Orb itself a kind of alliance program?
Alex Blania: In a sense, yes. There are many incentive mechanisms behind it to really make it work, but that is the direction it is heading. Then, the Worldcoin Foundation basically just sets the standards, and then others will be able to produce their own hardware devices and connect to the protocol. This is just the first phase of this big process, which is estimated to take 10 years to complete decentralization. Ultimately, everyone will be able to produce Orbs, and in the end, everyone will also be able to operate them. The protocol will basically pay people.
Bankless: Interesting. The Orb has actually become a commercial product that anyone willing to participate can manufacture. There is also some financial incentive from the protocol to encourage Orb manufacturers to make Orbs. So what are the grassroots experiences of Orb operators? Since they are not actual company members, what has the experience of managing these people been like?
Sam Altman: Now we have a team that includes people who have worked at Airbnb, Uber, and all these companies. They bring a lot of experience on how to operate these decentralized models. There are many issues regarding quality control and fraud detection, etc., that we don't need to delve into. But another thing is to empower users as much as possible, so putting as many features into the app as possible and educating users as much as possible before registration.
Bankless: Yes. I think humanity has never seen a project with such extensibility. Alex, in your view, where are we now on the WorldCoin roadmap? How much work is left to be done?
Alex Blania: Sam mentioned that the progress and specialization of WorldCoin have exceeded expectations, so we might be slightly ahead on the roadmap. We are still in the early stages of this big project, and there is still much work to be done to achieve global coverage. But so far, we have made good progress and laid the groundwork for future work. The key is to maintain momentum, continue to iterate and expand. By building valuable products, we can attract more users and developers to join the ecosystem. The entire decentralization and incentive mechanism will also take time to develop. So there is a long way to go, but the outlook is positive. By continuously focusing on users and staying agile, we can achieve the ultimate vision.
Sam Altman: There are still three and a half orders of magnitude of growth space in front of us. It is still very early to say. I remember when the Worldcoin project first debuted, the crypto industry completely mocked it. I think that was an expected result, like saying, put your iris in this Orb, and you will get some tokens. That is a visceral reaction, and I think it is understandable. However, one thing I noticed is that it attracted talent in a way that I have not seen in other projects. Many people, in fact, I have experienced this twice, I was in some social environment, some social occasion, and someone from Worldcoin would pull out an Orb. People inside Worldcoin really love these Orbs. So the Worldcoin team continues to build, iterating, attracting some talent, and attracting some builders, thinkers, and developers whom I respect who were not previously part of the Worldcoin team.
Bankless: So the Worldcoin project is not only making progress on its own track, but the perception around Worldcoin has also changed. Can you talk about that experience?
Alex Blania: At that time, we actually did not want to announce it. There was a very annoying journalist who leaked it, forcing us to respond. So I remember very clearly that we were a super small team at that time. Due to COVID, I lost my student visa. We were stuck in a small town in Germany called Erlangen. I remember receiving an email from a Bloomberg reporter around 11 PM on a Friday night. The email said, if you do not respond, we will report this. So everything went haywire. Everyone was saying Sam Altman was launching this project. So a dozen people were stuck in a small village in Germany, trying to cope with it all. This was the very early stage. But then, as you said, we attracted incredible talent, one of the best teams in the field. Then, a flywheel effect began to happen, and people outside the company also became excited about it.
Bankless: The situation has been incredible in recent weeks, as we are now receiving tremendous excitement and attention. What do you think, Sam?
Sam Altman: For me, the shock is not that great because I have experienced similar ups and downs before. But the level of personal attacks and hatred that this project has suffered is indeed very high. I remember one day, I didn't want to look at too much Twitter; I felt that looking too much was not healthy, but one day I logged in and spent a long time scrolling through what they were saying. I thought, this is really very personal.
Bankless: Sam, have you encountered similar situations with OpenAI?
Sam Altman: Yes, OpenAI has very passionate supporters and very passionate opponents. You have to learn to adapt to both. I think no matter how you explain the technology and zero-knowledge proofs inside the Orb, some people simply cannot accept the privacy aspect. If they don't like it, they don't have to register. I think it is important to emphasize this consistently.
Bankless: Exactly. In a recent Bankless weekly report, I talked about this interview, saying that I had breakfast with members of Worldcoin, and there was an Orb decoration on the table, which was very interesting. Some people said, wow, Bankless is talking to people from Worldcoin, which is shocking. So some people hold very extreme views…
Alex Blania: Yes, you can imagine, I have had many such conversations. I think 99% of the conversations, the answer is usually that the other party has not actually read the documents or tried to understand what is happening. If you really explain the details carefully, you can usually calm the other party down. The bigger issue is that you actually do not need to believe us, nor do you need to believe us in the future, because a lot of things have already been open-sourced. We often receive feedback like this, and I think it is completely understandable that not everything is open-sourced yet. Obviously, we will push this forward as soon as possible. But in reality, we have to weigh trade-offs. So, do not believe us. Look at the documents, look at the code. If you find something unsatisfactory, literally, communicate with us, and we will find a way to address the issue.
Bankless: If this interview sparks interest in Worldcoin, what does Worldcoin need most to drive development? What do you need most to change the situation?
Alex Blania: We are basically hiring in all areas. From product to AI, everything. In our case, this is not AGI, but edge neural networks for detecting various fraud attacks. So this requires different skills, of course. But indeed, it is across the board. If you are great in operations, if you are strong in technology, please contact us.
7. Brief Discussion on AI
Bankless: Can you briefly share your stance on the AI debate?
Sam Altman: First, we need to make more technological advancements. We have laid out a roadmap that outlines how we think we will address this issue. But one undeniable point is that we need new technologies beyond LHF (language model fine-tuning). I do not understand why some people say that because we have LHF, the tuning problem is solved. Absolutely not, I want to be very, very clear about that. So there is still a lot of work to be done in that regard.
Second, I think once we have the technical capability to tune superintelligence, we will need a complex set of international regulatory agreements and cooperation among leading groups. This will require a series of very complex negotiations and agreements, and we are currently laying the groundwork for that.
Third, how do we limit the misuse of AI execution? Human misuse of AI will cause tremendous damage or harm to society. So how these limiting rules will be formulated is something we need to discuss.
