Worldcoin – Sam Altman's second company
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on the Handelsblatt podcast: iris scanning, cryptocurrency and universal basic income – one of the wildest stories I have covered in my career.
This is one of the wildest stories I have covered in my career: Worldcoin. Proof of personhood, cryptocurrency, universal basic income – the new project from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and his German co-founder Alex Blania wants to be many things at the same time. At its centre is an iris scanner developed in Erlangen and manufactured in Germany.
In this episode of Handelsblatt Disrupt, Altman and Blania explain their project in detail. I had already scanned my own eyes for the cover story in Handelsblatt. The project sounds extraordinary – and that is exactly what it is: an idea that could only emerge from Silicon Valley.
A new cryptocurrency from ChatGPT inventor Sam Altman and Bavarian entrepreneur Alex Blania aims to make the global financial system fairer. Anyone who has their iris scanned receives an initial token grant.
The technology is intended, long-term, to create the basis for a universal basic income – for the era when powerful AI algorithms take over many parts of everyday life. The scan is needed to distinguish humans from artificial intelligence in the future, the founders argue.
Germany’s data protection authority and the financial regulator BaFin see risks and unresolved questions in the project. A stolen password can be changed – your iris lasts a lifetime, warns the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Worldcoin has no operating licence in Germany; the Bavarian data protection authority has opened an investigation.
In the podcast, Altman also explains why he believes a universal basic income is essential in a world of powerful AI – and how Worldcoin and OpenAI connect.