WLD has dropped by 98%, and Altman is no longer endorsing UBI

According to Pulse On Beating monitoring, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a podcast with The Atlantic's CEO Nicholas Thompson: "My belief in UBI is not as strong as before." Universal Basic Income (UBI, regular cash payments to everyone) is his flagship advocacy for the past 8 years, but now he thinks that the money-for-all approach is not viable. He is more interested in "collective ownership," where everyone holds compute shares or AI company equity, so the more AI earns, the more you earn, instead of receiving a fixed monthly payment.

Altman even launched a cryptocurrency project called World (formerly Worldcoin) to promote UBI, with the core design being iris scanning to verify real identities before distributing WLD tokens, creating a crypto version of universal basic income. However, the current price of WLD is around $0.25, a 98% drop from its historical high of $11.82 in March 2024. Four weeks ago, the World Foundation sold around 239 million WLD near its all-time low, cashing out $65 million. Altman's shift away from believing in UBI at this moment is worth pondering.

He is concerned that the AI dividend will be captured by a few. He mentioned that if compute is scarce, tools are hard to use, and integration is low, the wealthy will drive up compute prices, exacerbating wealth inequality. He believes that the most crucial thing is to massively build compute power to make AI as cheap and accessible as possible. Having compute power alone is not sufficient; user-friendly tools are also essential. He cited Codex as an example: three months ago, it was a command-line tool that only a handful of technical people could handle; now, it is available as an app, but still not user-friendly enough for non-technical users, stating that "there is still a lot to be done."