Sam Altman's Worldcoin: scanning the iris of humanity
The OpenAI founder has long been a key figure in Silicon Valley. ChatGPT has now made him an icon.
What it’s about
Sam Altman triggered the AI boom with OpenAI. Now his next big project is coming into focus: Worldcoin. A company that wants to scan the iris of eight billion people, as the basis for a global digital currency and a universal basic income. The idea is so wild that even technology-friendly Silicon Valley is taking notice. Altman himself faces prominent critics – including Tesla CEO Elon Musk. None of that seems to slow him down.
Who Altman is
At conferences with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Altman by now stands on stage as the real star. ChatGPT writes letters, DALL-E produces photo-realistic images, Whisper translates speech. Altman is 37 and faces the question that has driven many tech founders before him: what comes after the first billion-dollar success? For him, the answer is apparently: think bigger.
The debate over the dangers
Altman’s critics accuse him of underestimating the risks of AI development. Elon Musk co-signed an open letter calling for a research pause. Italy’s data protection authority temporarily blocked ChatGPT. Altman has a dual strategy: on the one hand, he himself calls for an international regulatory body modelled on the atomic-energy agency. On the other, he accelerates development, including with Worldcoin – and creates new attack surfaces in the process.
What Worldcoin promises
The promise is big: if AI systems will soon be indistinguishable from humans, the internet needs proof of identity that is forgery-proof. The iris scan is meant to deliver that. At the same time Worldcoin is meant to be a cryptocurrency that pays out to people around the world – as preparation for a society in which AI takes over many jobs. Critics see the biometric data collection as a privacy nightmare. The question: how much risk is justifiable when the promise is this big?
I wrote the full story for Handelsblatt.