Exclusive Interview with Worldcoin Co-founder: Expect to See Integration with ChatGPT in the Next Decade
Source: Bankless Podcast
Translation by: 0x 711, kaori, BlockBeats
On July 24th, Worldcoin released a public letter signed by Sam Altman, announcing the official launch of WLD. The letter stated that Worldcoin, which has been established for more than three years, aims to create a new identity and financial network that is owned by everyone. Starting today, Worldcoin will be introduced, and if successful, it will significantly increase economic opportunities, provide reliable solutions to distinguish between artificial intelligence and humans, protect privacy, promote global democratic processes, and ultimately may demonstrate a potential path to achieve a global Universal Basic Income funded by AI (AI-funded UBI).
On the same day, a well-known cryptocurrency podcast program, Bankless, released an interview video with Worldcoin co-founders Alex Blania and Sam Altman, conducted on May 14th, on the Youtube platform. The interview covers 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 has translated and organized the interview content as follows.
Origin and Initial Concept of the Worldcoin Project
Bankless: Worldcoin is one of the most ambitious projects in the cryptocurrency space. The project has a token, an exclusive Layer 2 network, an identity protocol, and a mobile application. Of course, the most memorable part is the iconic Worldcoin hardware device - the silver Orb. The idea behind Worldcoin is that the best way to uniquely and verifiably identify "human to human" is through biometric identification related to our unique DNA. Sam, can you talk about the origin of the idea behind Worldcoin? Where does it come from, and why do we need Worldcoin?
Sam Altman: I initially thought about what it would be like to have the largest possible network, such as an imaginable largest financial and identity network. When we first started discussing this idea, I wondered if there were other complex ways to verify identity besides scanning everyone's palm prints worldwide.
What excites me about this is that as the world moves towards powerful AI systems, I believe it will be very important if we can do something that eventually redistributes wealth - perhaps even access to these systems will be the most important component of wealth one day - and also protect privacy from different perspectives, which will become increasingly important as AI progresses.
So, many years ago, I started thinking about this issue primarily driven by my work at OpenAI. At the same time, I also believed that Universal Basic Income (UBI) was a cool thing worth researching. Although my ideas had many shortcomings at that time, I still wanted to explore this field. Later, I met Max and Alex, and I thought Alex was outstanding. I will let Alex talk about how this project has evolved to where it is today because Alex has played a significant role in it.
Bankless: So, can we say that Worldcoin was initially a two-pronged project? It combined UBI and identity recognition. Did you already have in mind to achieve both of these goals before having a concrete solution?
Sam Altman: Yes, if we take a broader view, it's actually about solving the problem of verifying "person-to-person." That's the foundation for solving the problem. Having a non-fradulent solution that can do that while also protecting privacy would be perfect.
Bankless: Now let's talk about how Sam and Alex met, when the idea of Worldcoin came about, and how Alex joined the project.
Alex Blania: We truly started researching it in January 2020. I believe Sam and Max had been researching it for six months prior, but Max still had a full-time job, and Sam obviously did too. So, when I joined, we formed the founding team and started researching it more seriously. Before Worldcoin, my focus was mainly on theoretical physics and how to use deep learning to predict AI systems, so it didn't have much to do with crypto. I actually read about Bitcoin very early on, so I can say that I was an early adopter in the crypto space, but I couldn't say that I had a deep understanding of crypto before Worldcoin. Later, Max sent me an email with the Worldcoin whitepaper and initial ideas, very high-level thinking, explaining the importance of this project and where it could go. I drove to San Francisco, had several conversations with Max, followed by an interview with Sam. We spent more time together, and eventually, I became a co-founder of the project.
Bankless: Was Worldcoin always an crypto project from the beginning?
Alex Blania: Yes, I believe it was.
Bankless: Sam, initially, you had the idea of scanning palm prints, but Worldcoin chose iris scanning instead. Can you talk about this choice? Then we can delve into the technology inside the Orb.
Sam Altman: As Alex just mentioned, the initial idea of the project was centered around a research paper. One major problem is that you essentially need to solve the problem of civil resistance in order to distribute tokens to everyone. Why do you want to do this? Because it will incentivize a truly large-scale network growth to the entire human race and truly 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 to benefit all of humanity, and the big problem you have to solve first is what is called civil resistance in the encryption community. I believe you are very familiar with this. In simple terms, this means that a person can prove to the network that they are truly unique in this network. Why is this important? Because what happens if you don't do this? Bad actors will simply disrupt the entire token distribution mechanism and everything will collapse. As you know, this still happens frequently in the crypto field 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 that we must solve first. Then we conducted quite in-depth research. The entire founding team mostly comes from Caltech or the Max Planck Institute, and we all have backgrounds in physics. We surveyed the entire industry and came up with three feasible solutions:
The first is KYC, using the government's citizen identification system. But this solution was immediately ruled out because less than half of the world's population has a digital identity that can be verified. Considering inclusivity, this solution is not scalable. It may be very effective in Europe and the United States, but it is not feasible globally.
The second major direction is the so-called Web of Trust. Trying to build a trust-based network. This is a very idealistic idea, but it has never really been implemented or scaled. However, I think this is something that Worldcoin can introduce in the future, and we can discuss it later.
The last option is biometrics. So we actually implemented demos of these three solutions. After careful consideration, we decided to adopt the biometric approach. Before we discuss specific identification patterns, you first need to understand that everything you use in your daily life, such as 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 roughly the same feature vector, and after verification, 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 from each user to achieve, otherwise the fraud rate will grow exponentially and actually encounter bottlenecks. This is very important. The fraud rate is not a fixed value, but rather you will suddenly hit a ceiling. Things like facial images do not have enough information entropy. Neither do fingerprints. Theoretically, palm prints could, but there is no ready-made commercial solution, and iris is the key.
Bankless: So you mean that facial images and other information do not have enough "uniqueness" to perform reliable natural person verification, right?
Sam Altman: That's right, at least if you only use a normal mobile phone camera.
Bankless: Okay, so when you were looking for ways to verify individual identities, you concluded that government IDs wouldn't work because they don't align with the idea of cryptocurrency. You also mentioned that trust models on the internet are still experimental in the cryptocurrency world. Therefore, establishing a unique human identity and a biometric solution is the most reliable and mature model. That's why you chose iris scanning. Am I correct in assuming that the entropy of iris information is very high, on the order of magnitude you mentioned?
Alex Blania: Exactly, you are absolutely right.
Orb's Technical Principles
Bankless: So this also explains why Worldcoin exists in its current form and why there's a need for hardware devices like Orb. If we rely solely on identification documents like those in the United States or trust models on the internet, Worldcoin would only be able to operate in the realm of cryptocurrencies. But since we need to collect actual biological feature information, correlate it with human DNA to ensure uniqueness, we actually have to establish a real-world solution, and that's why we need Orb. Can you briefly explain the technical principles behind Orb and how it accomplishes its work?
Alex Blania: As you summarized earlier, this project's way of changing the world is extremely important. Digital content (images or videos) and intelligent algorithms are no longer capable of distinguishing what is human. Therefore, you actually need to connect to the real world, which I believe is the only way to solve this problem.
We started manufacturing Orb very early on. We have done a lot of engineering work, even custom designing the cameras. Orb has many sensors that can detect whether what we see is a real person or a display or an AI trying to deceive us. All these computations are done locally. So the first step is to confirm that the subject is a human. Then, the eyes are filmed, the unique encoding of the iris is computed by neural networks, and it is signed by the Orb device, which is the only information leaving the device. This is very important and cool: the uniqueness check is separated from the user's wallet 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 think Worldcoin offers a choice that makes it a privacy-protecting, open-source, and decentralized solution. So, I know it might initially sound contradictory to intuition because it involves biometrics and such, but if you really understand the engineering principles behind it, you'll realize that the privacy concerns people have aren't actually a problem.
Bankless: Of course. I understand that iris scanning is an already mature technology. As far as I know, most of the technologies in Orb are actually aimed at preventing human deception of Orb. It can scan your iris, and that's its function. But most of the technologies in Orb are to ensure that humans don't cheat during the process of obtaining iris scans. Can you explain the various layers of technology included in Orb?
Alex Blania: Orb actually addresses two main issues, as you mentioned, fraud prevention. This can be divided into two points: one is presenting content that is not from real humans to the device; the other is directly physically attacking the device itself. So you can directly enter the processor and try to insert data streams that are not from imaging. This is the first point. The second point is imaging resolution. All the biometric devices we have tested do not have enough resolution to scale to the entire human population. They do not have high enough resolution, which is why we have to make our own lenses and imaging systems, etc. This also takes a lot of effort.
So I think these two aspects require similar engineering efforts. But regarding your question, Orb has a multispectral sensor in front of it, which captures images in multiple wavelengths such as infrared and 3D time-of-flight to ensure that what we see is human. You can show a display or more complex optical devices to deceive it. This requires quite a lot of engineering to achieve. And then, a cool thing is that all the 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.
How does WorldCoin address privacy concerns
Bankless: One concern about the WorldCoin project is privacy. Since you can prove that someone is human by scanning the iris, how does WorldCoin address privacy concerns?
Alex Blania: First, we agree on the seriousness of privacy concerns. This is also why we were very cautious when designing WorldCoin. Indeed, biometric technology may 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 primarily addresses privacy concerns in three aspects:
First, biometric data is not stored. Image scanning is done on the local device, and computation is also performed internally on the local device, and only iris codes signed by Orb will leave the device. These codes are used for matching and comparison with all users.
Second, and most importantly, through zero-knowledge proofs, identity uniqueness verification is separate from the user's wallet. This provides great privacy protection.
Third, the entire setup is self-hosted. Users will have a non-custodial wallet when registering, and subsequently generate zero-knowledge proofs to prove their membership in the user community.
I believe there are currently no other solutions that can address the same problem at this scale with almost zero privacy risks. In addition, all the code will be open-source. Most of the hardware is already open-source, and the firmware code is also gradually being open-sourced. The entire setup will also be fully decentralized, which is, of course, challenging, but we will achieve it. We have invested a lot of time and resources to build WorldCoin in this way.
Bankless: To understand this system at a high level, it seems like there are many working parts. The system includes hardware inside the orb, zero-knowledge cryptography, and a mobile application. Can you please explain in detail how someone goes through the process of identity verification through iris scanning, then converts it to data, and finally goes through a series of steps to turn it into a process where someone can validate their login in their WorldCoin application? Can you talk about 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: Sure, let me try to explain the workflow of this system. Users who are interested in WorldCoin download the World App (currently the only client for WorldCoin, but other wallets will support it in the future) after understanding it. They locate nearby Orb devices on the map and personally appear in front of the device. During the verification process, users click "Verify Now" and generate two pairs of key pairs: one is the Ethereum wallet key pair, and the second is the identity wallet key pair. Both pairs of keys are stored on the user's phone.
During verification, the user displays the public key to the device. First, the Orb device performs a natural person check, followed by a uniqueness check. This involves capturing eye images, computing a unique feature code using neural networks, and signing it with the 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 is decentralized as well).
When the user uses World ID, zero-knowledge proofs are used to prove that this public key has been included in the user set. This allows users to use this proof in different ecosystems, not only on Ethereum but also bridging to other chains or using it for web logins without revealing any personal information.
In addition, based on this "natural person proof" concept, WorldID is also an identity protocol that allows developers to attach other verifiable credentials. So its functionality goes beyond just human verification. In conclusion, this is the entire process from eye scanning to the mobile end.
Bankless: Does WorldCoin ask for your name, date of birth, or address during the verification process?
Alex Blania: No, the only situation where this question arises is when you use the Deposit and Withdrawal solution because there is an unmanaged wallet in the application, also in WorldApp, where you can make withdrawals through a withdrawal provider who might ask for your name. But that's not us. In the WorldCoin system, your name, date of birth, address, or similar information is not required.
The Intersection of WorldCoin and AI
Bankless: So it can be said that Worldcoin provides a public address for humanity, right? And this address is derived from verifiable humans. Sam, as one of the co-founders of WorldCoin, from the perspective of OpenAI, do you think having a verifiable human address list would be very useful in the age of AI? Why do we need this kind of address in the next ten years or century?
Sam Altman: I think besides the reasons I mentioned earlier, there will be other reasons in the future. I think it is very important that, in the age when AI is being developed as a human tool, I think there will be many benefits that come from them, like access rights, governance rights, and so on, which will belong to true humans. We really like many advantages of the WorldCoin solution. As Alex just explained, while the privacy perspective is different from what people imagined before, I think it is a very appealing perspective. I also think it is a very fair system. It may be the most inclusive system we can imagine.
Bankless: Alex, have you seen other use cases in the crypto space? Airdrops are another one, but they have been dampened due to the lack of proof of natural person.
Alex Blania: I started with cryptocurrencies first, then we can broaden the scope a bit. I have been to many different countries and talked to many users from Latin America, Europe, and Africa. I think the crypto space can provide a lot of financial primitives technically, but they haven't been realized yet due to several different reasons. One reason is user experience, but a bigger reason is that you need reputation to implement these features. The concept of credit scoring, basically a on-chain credit scoring, so that you can have low-collateral loans, is something I think is a big concept and hope it will come up soon. And proof of human is the basis for identity. It's not identity, they are different because identity means I am a unique individual, this is my name, that is my birthdate, or that is my Github account. So proof of human is like the foundational building block that makes all these things happen.
Bankless: Sam, most people know you through OpenAI and your association with ChatGPT. How do you envision the specific ways in which OpenAI and WorldCoin could integrate?
Sam Altman: I think it's too early to talk about the specifics now, but as we observe this process over the next ten years, I hope it will become apparent.
Bankless: How does the actual distribution of Worldcoin work? How does it reach people? And what is the distribution plan like? How do I get WLD? How much can I get? What are the details?
Alex Blania: We can't discuss many details here because there is regulatory uncertainty in the United States. So we won't go into details here, but the overall mechanism is very simple. You download an application, verify through an orb, and then receive your personal identification at a certain point in time. After that, you will receive WLD every week. The whole system is built on this foundation and can be scaled to billions of people. This situation will continue for about the next decade.
Bankless: Will there be incentives for early adopters of your Worldcoin ID?
Alex Blania: The whole process is not just about the Worldcoin ID. At launch, Worldcoin includes three components we have talked about: Worldcoin, World ID, and World Dapp. Worldcoin is a protocol aimed at expanding to all of humanity, something we have never seen before because there has never been citizen resistance. What will be more important in the next decade? The token or the World ID? These are unknowns because 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 cutting-edge hardware component. There is the token, which has its own cutting-edge distribution mechanism. There is a mobile application. And there are actual scanning works. We haven't even talked about the second layer built on the OP stack, which has many mobile components. So, what does it feel like to manage an entrepreneurial company that needs to achieve a high level in so many areas?
Alex Blania: It's definitely been a crazy journey. Because people always forget that, at the beginning, we actually only had four people. We all just graduated from college, so we never worked anywhere before. Now it's a massive team of 180 people spread across different fields, working towards the same goal. As you said, we have a fairly mature hardware team, protocol team, economic team, and artificial intelligence team. There are a lot of things going on, many moving parts. So it's definitely been a quite exciting experience. And then, over time, it shifted from early hardware focus to product focus, and now operational focus. So it will become a massive operational machine.
Sam Altman: It's really cool to see how the Worldcoin team is embracing new challenges. One thing I love about startups is seeing people learn how much they can accomplish and how much they can do. Especially for small teams. I don't remember where I first heard this, but there's a somewhat famous saying in startups that if you knew how hard it was going to be, you would never start. So a little bit of naivety at the beginning is important. Smart, motivated, and united small teams can achieve much more than they realize. But even so, the Worldcoin team has definitely exceeded expectations.
Bankless: Sam, are you more involved in the WorldCoin project on a daily basis? Maybe not on a daily basis, but where do you interact with WorldCoin?
Sam Altman: I'll do my best to help with whatever Alex needs. But it seems like this is quite different, and I'll try to provide assistance wherever possible.
WorldCoin's Collaboration with Optimism
Bankless: WorldCoin recently announced that it will issue tokens on the Optimism mainnet. Can you explain the reasons and significance behind this decision?
Sam Altman: Yes, actually what we announced last week is that the tokens themselves will be issued on the Optimism mainnet. So we didn't announce the OP stack layer 2. We will certainly be doing our own Layer 2 at some point, but not at the time of release, that will come later this year. Why choose Optimism? Well, they have given us a lot of feedback on the entire tech stack over the past few months. It was just about two months ago that we decided that we needed to strengthen this and really start collaborating. Of course, it starts with the migration, but it goes far beyond that. We will be working together on identity primitives, including Base. So yes, there will be a lot happening. So the simple implementation is putting WorldCoin on Optimism. That's the starting point.
Bankless: So WorldCoin will also be using Optimism's chain for other infrastructure?
Alex Blania: Yes, WorldCoin's infrastructure will also be using Optimism's chain. So WorldID is completely independent as it is essentially a Merkle tree that resides on the Ethereum mainnet, and users can include proofs of it. And then this will bridge into different ecosystems. So it's not just about Ethereum. WLD will be issued on OP mainnet, and later this year, we will have our own Layer 2.
WorldCoin's Expansion Strategy
Bankless: So far, how many irises have been scanned? How many people have obtained a WorldCoin ID? What has been the strategy so far?
Sam Altman: Of course. So far (May 14th) it's 1.7 million. All of this is just a start for us. So now we have 210 devices. Most of the time, we only had about 50 devices, mainly because we had to iterate on the product. Scale only matters once everything is up and running. So we're just a few weeks away from launch, which is why we're talking about this now. What was the strategy? In the early stages of the project, the question was, how many people would register when you show up with an Orb in public? Is it really effective? Can you generate enough throughput with just one of these devices to scale to billions? That was our initial definition of product-market fit and what scale we needed to achieve. So we built a prototype, and I actually went around Berlin registering users with these devices. I remember one of my colleagues, Sandro, achieved 70 registrations in a day. With those 70 registrations per day, we were able to secure our Series A funding back then. Because if you take 70 registrations per day, multiply it by a week, and you get a tripling effect, meaning it was 300 to 500 registrations per week back then. That meant tens of thousands of devices would be enough to scale to the billions level. That was one of the surprising things at the time. Since then, it has been like the initial stage of concept validation. Then in the second stage, we globalized it. We had 15 devices, and we tried to deploy them in different markets all over the world to see if there were any fundamental barriers that we were not aware of. So we traveled from Tromsø in Norway, where the capacitors exploded because it was too cold, to Nairobi in Kenya, to Latin America. All of this was done during COVID. So it has been quite a journey. We had team members who had to travel through five different countries before finally reaching the country they intended to go to, because of COVID. Recently, we now have O-Pacific, which is a more specialized team in this area. We are focusing on four markets: Buenos Aires in Argentina, Lisbon in Portugal, Nairobi in Kenya, as well as Bangalore and Delhi in India. These four markets are the perfect launch platforms as they are larger regions. So if you want to build a product, we believe these are the places you should start with. Basically, we are sending out the product team to establish a presence in all four of these locations. I try to visit them as much as possible, and we will expand from there.
Bankless: You can't hire Orb operators for every person in the world, right? So how do you spread the Orb worldwide so that operators can use it? Do you hire every Orb operator? What's the strategy here?
Alex Blania: No, Worldcoin actually needs to be a decentralized protocol. So it's not a strategy. The way it works is that when you operate an Orb, you earn income from the protocol for each registration. Besides that, there are many incentive mechanisms.
Bankless: Is Orb itself a consortium program?
Alex Blania: In a sense, yes. There are many incentives behind it to make it truly effective, but that's the direction it's heading. Then, the Worldcoin Foundation is basically just setting the standards and then others will be able to produce their own hardware devices and connect to the protocol. This is just the first stage of the whole process, which will likely take 10 years to fully decentralize. Eventually, everyone will be able to produce Orbs, and in the end, everyone will be able to operate them. The protocol will basically pay people.
Bankless: Interesting. Orb has essentially 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 produce Orbs. So, what is the grassroots experience like for Orb operators? What is it like managing these people since they are not actual company members?
Sam Altman: Now we have a team that has worked at companies like Airbnb and Uber. They bring a lot of experience in operating these decentralized models. There are many issues regarding quality control and fraud detection that we don't need to dive into. But one thing is to give power to users as much as possible, so putting as many features as possible into the application and educating users before registration.
Bankless: Yes. I think we have never seen such a scalable project before. Alex, in your opinion, where are we on the WorldCoin roadmap right now? How much work is left to be done?
Alex Blania: Sam mentioned that the progress and professionalization of WorldCoin have exceeded expectations, so we may be slightly ahead on the roadmap. We are still in the early stages of this major project, and there is still a lot of work to do to achieve global coverage. But so far, we have made good progress and laid a foundation for subsequent work. The key is to maintain momentum, continue iterating and expanding. By building valuable products, attracting more users and developers to join the ecosystem. The whole decentralization and incentive mechanism also need time to develop. So, there is still a long way to go, but the outlook is positive. By staying focused on users and being agile, we can achieve the ultimate vision.
Sam Altman: There is still three and a half orders of magnitude growth space ahead of us. It's not very early to say now. I remember when the Worldcoin project first appeared, the crypto industry mocked it completely. I think this is the expected result, for example, putting your iris in this Orb, and then you can get some tokens. This is an instinctive reaction, which I think is understandable. However, one thing I noticed is that it attracted talent in a way I haven't seen in other projects. There have been many people, in fact, it has happened to me twice in a certain social environment, a certain social occasion, someone from the Worldcoin company would take out an Orb. People inside Worldcoin really like these orbs. So the Worldcoin team continues to build, iterate, attracting some talent, attracting some builders, thinkers, and developers that I respect who were not in the Worldcoin team before.
Bankless: So the Worldcoin project has not only made progress on its own track, but also changed the perception around Worldcoin. Can you talk about this experience?
Alex Blania: We actually didn't want to announce it at the time. There was a very annoying journalist who leaked it, forcing us to deal with it. So I remember very clearly, we were a super small team at the time. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I lost my student visa. We were trapped in a small town in Germany called Erlangen. I remember around 11 pm on a Friday night, I received an email from a Bloomberg journalist. The email said that if we don't respond, they will report this. So everything got messed up. Everyone said Sam Altman is launching this project. So a dozen of us were stuck in a small village in Germany, trying to deal with all of this. That was the very early stage. But then, as you said, we attracted incredible talent, one of the best teams in this field. And then, a flywheel effect started to happen, people outside the company also got excited about it.
Bankless: The past few weeks have been incredibly mind-blowing because now we have this huge excitement and attention. What do you think, Sam?
Sam Altman: The impact is not as big for me because I have experienced similar ups and downs before. But the level of personal attacks and hate this project has received is really high. I remember one day, I didn't want to look at Twitter too much because I feel it's unhealthy to look at it too much, but one day I spent a long time scrolling through what they were saying after logging in. I thought, this is really very personal attacks.
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 in Orb, some people simply cannot accept the privacy implications. If they don't like it, they don't have to register. I think this point is important and needs to be emphasized.
Bankless: That's right. I mentioned this interview in the recent Bankless newsletter, talking about having breakfast with members of Worldcoin, and there was an Orb decoration on the table, which was interesting. Some people were shocked that Bankless was engaging with people from Worldcoin. So some people hold very extreme views...
Alex Blania: Yes, you can imagine, I've had many conversations like that. I think in 99% of the conversations, the answer is usually that the other person hasn't actually read the documentation or tried to understand what's happening. If you really explain the details carefully, you can usually calm the other person down. The bigger problem is that you don't actually need to trust us, and you won't need to trust us in the future, because many things are already open-sourced. We often receive this kind of feedback, which I think is completely understandable, as not everything is open-sourced at the moment. Obviously, we will push this forward as soon as possible. But in reality, we have to weigh the pros and cons. So, don't trust us. Read the documentation, read the code. If you find something unsatisfactory, quite literally, communicate with us, and we will find a way to address the issue.
Bankless: If this interview generates interest in Worldcoin, what does Worldcoin most need to drive development? What do you need to change the situation?
Alex Blania: We are basically hiring in all areas. From product to AI, everything is needed. In our case, it's not AGI, but edge neural networks for detecting various fraud attacks. So it requires different skills, of course. But it's indeed all aspects. If you are strong in operations, if you are strong in technology, please contact us.
A Brief Discussion on AI
Bankless: Can you briefly talk about your position on the AI debate?
Sam Altman: First, we need to make more technological progress. We have set a roadmap outlining how we think we will solve this problem. But one undeniable point is that we need new technologies beyond just language model fine-tuning (LHF). I don't understand why some people say that adjusting the problem is solved because we have LHF. Absolutely not, I want to make it very, very clear. So there is a lot of work to be done in that regard.
Second, I think once we have the technological capability to adjust superintelligence, we will need a complex international regulatory framework and cooperation among leading organizations. This will require a series of very complex negotiations and agreements, and we are laying the groundwork for that now.
Third, how do we limit the misuse of AI? The misuse of AI by humans will cause significant damage or harm to society. So how will these restriction rules be formulated, is something we need to discuss.
Bankless: Fantastic, Sam and Alex, thank you very much for accepting today's interview.
