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Sam Altman discusses Worldcoin: Expect to see integration with ChatGPT within the next decade.

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Everything you want to know about Worldcoin is here.

Source: Bankless Podcast

Translation: 0x711, kaori, BlockBeats

On July 24th, Worldcoin released a public letter signed by Sam Altman, announcing the official launch of WLD. The letter stated that for over three years, Worldcoin has been dedicated to creating a new identity and financial network that is accessible to everyone. With the launch of Worldcoin today, if successful, it will significantly increase economic opportunities, provide a reliable solution to distinguish between artificial intelligence and humans, protect privacy, promote global democracy, and ultimately potentially pave the way for a global basic income funded by artificial intelligence (AI-funded UBI).

On the same day, the well-known encryption podcast Bankeless released an interview video on May 14th with Worldcoin's two co-founders, Alex Blania and Sam Altman, on the Youtube platform. The interview covers issues such as the Worldcoin project vision, the security and privacy of the Orb device, and the future development plan of WorldCoin. BlockBeats has translated and organized the interview content for the first time as follows.

Worldcoin project origin and initial concept

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 thing is that iconic Worldcoin hardware - the silver Orb. The idea behind Worldcoin is that the best way to uniquely verify "human-to-human" is through biometric identification related to our unique DNA. Sam, can you talk about the origin of this idea and why we need Worldcoin?

Sam Altman: Initially, I was thinking that if you could have the largest network, such as the imaginable largest financial and identity network, then this would be a very powerful, truly global network. When we first started discussing this idea, what came to mind was how we could scan everyone's palm around the world, and whether there were other complex methods to verify identity besides this?

I am excited about this because as the world moves towards powerful AI systems, I believe it will be very important if we can do something to ultimately redistribute wealth - perhaps even access to these systems will one day be the most important component of wealth - and also to protect privacy from different perspectives, which will become increasingly important as AI advances.

So, many years ago, I started thinking about this issue, mainly driven by my work at OpenAI. At the same time, I also believe that UBI (Universal Basic Income) is a cool thing worth studying. Although my ideas were still very inadequate at the time, I still wanted to explore this field. Later, I met Max and Alex, and I think Alex is very outstanding. Below, I will let Alex talk about how this project has come to today step by step, because Alex can be said to have made great contributions to it.

Bankless: So, can we say that Worldcoin was initially a two-pronged project? It combines UBI and identity recognition. Did you already plan to achieve both goals before having a practical solution?

Sam Altman: Yes, if you look at it from a higher perspective, it's actually solving the problem of verifying "human-to-human". This is the foundation for solving the problem, and 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 came about, and how Alex got involved in the project?

Alex Blania: We really started researching it in January 2020. I think Sam and Max had been researching it for 6 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 I didn't have much to do with cryptography. I actually read about Bitcoin very early on, so I'm one of the early people in the crypto space, but I couldn't say I knew much about crypto before Worldcoin. Later, Max sent me an email with the Worldcoin white paper and the initial ideas, very high-level ideas, and explained the importance of the project and where it could go. I drove to San Francisco and had several conversations with Max, then an interview with Sam, and then we spent more time together, and then I became a co-founder of the project.

Bankless: Was Worldcoin always a cryptocurrency project from the beginning?

Alex Blania: Yes, I think so.

Bankless: Sam, initially your idea was to scan palm prints, but Worldcoin didn't do that. It chose iris instead. Can you talk about this choice? Then we can start delving into the technology inside the sphere.

Sam Altman: As Alex just mentioned, the initial idea for the project was focused on a paper. One major issue is that you basically need to solve citizen resistance in order to distribute tokens to everyone. Why do you want to do this? Because it will incentivize a truly massive network to grow to the entire human race and truly guide this huge 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 first big problem you have to solve is the citizen resistance commonly referred to in the crypto community. I believe you are very familiar with this. Simply put, this means that a person can prove to the network that they are actually unique in the network. Why is this important? What happens if you don't do this? Bad actors will only destroy the entire token distribution mechanism and everything will collapse. As you know, David, this still happens frequently in crypto today. If you really want to expand it to the entire human race, this is a bigger problem.

Clearly, this is one of the biggest problems we must solve first. Then we conducted quite in-depth research. The entire founding team mostly comes from Caltech or Max Planck Institute, and we all have a background in physics. We surveyed the entire industry and came up with three feasible solutions:

Firstly, KYC, using the government's citizen identity verification system. However, this solution was immediately ruled out because less than half of the world's population has a digital identity document that can be verified. Considering inclusivity, this solution is not scalable. It may be effective in Europe and the United States, but it is not feasible globally.

The second major direction is the so-called Web of Trust. Try to establish a network based on trust relationships. This is a very idealistic concept, but it has never been truly implemented or expanded. However, I believe this is something that Worldcoin can introduce in the future, and we can discuss it later.

The last option is biometric recognition. So we actually implemented demos for these three solutions. After careful consideration, we decided to use biometric recognition. Before we discuss the specific recognition patterns, you need to understand one thing first: everything you use in your daily life, such as an iPhone, only re-authenticates 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 you can use the phone after passing the comparison. This is just a one-to-one comparison, which is relatively easy to implement. However, to solve the problem of provable human uniqueness, you need to compare a user with all other users. This requires collecting more information from each user to achieve, otherwise the fraud rate will increase exponentially, and you will actually encounter a bottleneck. This is very important. The fraud rate is not a fixed value, but you will suddenly encounter a ceiling. Facial images and fingerprints do not have enough information entropy. Theoretically, palm prints can be used, but there is no ready-made commercial solution. Iris recognition is the key.

Bankless: So you mean that facial images and other information do not have enough "uniqueness" to enable reliable verification of natural persons, right?

Sam Altman: Yes, at least if 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 they don't align with the principles of cryptocurrency. You also mentioned that trust models on the internet are still experimental in the cryptocurrency world. Therefore, establishing a unique human identity through a biometric solution is the most reliable and mature model. That's why you chose iris scanning, right? I guess the information entropy of iris is very high, on this order of magnitude, right?

Alex Blania: That's right, you're absolutely right.

Orb's Technical Principles

Bankless: So this also explains why Worldcoin exists in the way it does now, and why hardware devices like Orb are needed. If we rely solely on identity IDs like those in the United States or trust models on the internet, Worldcoin can only operate in the encryption field. However, because we need to collect actual biological information and correspond it with human DNA to determine uniqueness, we actually need to establish a real-world solution, which is why Orb is needed. Can you briefly introduce the technical principles of Orb and how it works?

Alex Blania: As you just 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 think this is the only way to solve this problem.

In the early days, we started manufacturing Orb. We did a lot of engineering work, even designing custom 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 of these calculations are done locally. Therefore, the first step is to confirm that the object is a human. Secondly, the eyes are filmed, and the unique encoding of the iris is calculated by a neural network, and then signed by the Orb device, which is the only information that leaves the device. This is very important and cool, that is, the uniqueness check is separate from the user's wallet and is achieved through zero-knowledge proof. That is to say, we or anyone else can only prove whether a user has been verified before, without any other information.

I believe that Worldcoin offers a choice that makes it a solution for privacy protection, open source, and decentralization. So, I know at first this may seem counterintuitive because it involves biometrics, but if you truly understand the engineering principles behind it, you will find that I believe there are no privacy concerns that people are worried about.

Bankless: Of course. I understand that iris scanning is a mature technology. As far as I know, most of the technology in Orb is actually used to prevent human deception of Orb. It can scan your iris, which is its function. But most of the technology in Orb is used to ensure that humans do not cheat in the process of obtaining iris scans. Can you explain the various layers of technology included in Orb?

Alex Blania: Orb actually solves two main problems, as you mentioned, anti-fraud. This can be divided into two points: one is to show the device that the content is not from real humans; the other is to directly physically attack 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 biometric devices we have tested do not have enough resolution to extend 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, which also took a lot of effort.

So I think both aspects require similar amount of effort. But regarding your question, Orb has a multispectral sensor in front of it, capturing images in multiple wavelengths such as infrared, time-of-flight 3D, etc. to ensure that what we see is human. You can display a monitor or a more complex optical device to deceive it. This requires quite a bit of engineering to achieve. And the cool thing is, 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.

WorldCoin 如何解决隐私问题

WorldCoin How to Solve Privacy Issues

Bankless: One of the concerns about the WorldCoin project is privacy. If you can prove that someone is human by scanning their iris, how does WorldCoin address privacy concerns?

Alex Blania: First of all, we agree on the seriousness of privacy issues. This is also why we were very cautious when designing WorldCoin. Indeed, biometric technology can be unsettling at first glance. However, if you truly 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. Image scanning is done on the local device, and computation is also done internally on the local device. Only the iris code that has been signed by Orb will eventually leave the device. These codes will be used to match and compare with all users.

Secondly, and most importantly, through zero-knowledge proof, identity verification is separated from user wallets. This provides great privacy protection.

Thirdly, the entire setup is self-hosted. When users register, they will have an unmanaged wallet and subsequently generate zero-knowledge proofs to prove themselves as members of the user group.

I believe that there is currently no other solution that can solve the same problem on this scale with almost zero privacy risk. In addition, all code will be open source. Most of the hardware has already been open sourced, and firmware code is also gradually being open sourced. The entire setup will also be completely decentralized, which of course is difficult, but we will achieve it. We have invested a lot of time and resources to build WorldCoin in this way.

Bankless: At a high level, it seems that there are many operational parts to this system. The system includes hardware inside a sphere, zero-knowledge cryptography, and a mobile application. Can you explain in detail how a person can be verified through iris scanning, then converted into data, and then through a series of steps, be able to log in and verify themselves 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: Okay, let me try to explain the workflow of this system. The user is interested in WorldCoin and downloads the World App (currently the only client for WorldCoin, but other wallets will support it in the future) after learning about it. The user searches for nearby Orb devices on the map and appears in front of the device in person. During verification, the user clicks "Verify Now" to generate two pairs of key pairs, one for the Ethereum wallet key and the other for the identity wallet key. Both pairs of keys are stored on the user's phone.

During verification, the user displays the public key to the device. Orb first performs a natural person check, followed by a uniqueness check, which involves taking a picture of the eye and using a neural network to calculate a unique feature code, which is then signed 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 (which is also decentralized).

After the

tag, when users use World ID, they can prove that this public key has been included in the user set through zero-knowledge proof. This allows users to use this proof in different ecosystems, not only on Ethereum, but also bridged to other chains, or used for web login without revealing any personal information.

In addition, based on the concept of "natural person proof", WorldID is also an identity protocol that allows developers to attach other verifiable credentials, etc. So its function is not only human verification. In short, this is the entire process from scanning with the eyes to the mobile end.

Bankless: Does Worldcoin not ask for your name, date of birth, or address during the verification process?

Alex Blania: No, the only situation where this problem may arise is when you are using a deposit and withdrawal solution, because in the application, as well as in WorldApp, there is a non-custodial wallet, which you can use to withdraw funds through a deposit and withdrawal provider, who will ask for your name, but this is not us. In any case, in the WorldCoin system, your name, date of birth, address, or similar information is not required.

Worldcoin and the Intersection with AI

Bankless: So it can be said that Worldcoin provides a public address for humanity, right? And the derivation of this address is verifiable humans. Sam, you are one of the co-founders of WorldCoin. From the perspective of OpenAI, you will find that in the age of AI, having a list of verifiable human addresses will be very useful. So why do we need this type of address in the next decade or century?

Sam Altman: I think there will be other reasons in the future besides the ones I mentioned now. I think it is very important that in the era when AI is being developed as a human tool, there will be many benefits from them, such as access rights, governance rights, and so on, 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 imagined before, I think it is a very attractive perspective. I also think it is a very fair system. This may be the most inclusive system we can imagine.

Bankless: Alex, have you seen any other use cases in the cryptocurrency industry? Airdrops are another example, but the distribution of tokens has been downplayed due to the lack of KYC (Know Your Customer) verification.

Alex Blania: I started with cryptocurrency, and then we can broaden the scope a bit. I have talked to many users from Latin America, Europe, and Africa in many different countries. I think the encryption field can provide many financial primitives technically, but they have not been implemented due to several different reasons. One reason is user experience, but a bigger reason is that you need reputation to implement these functions. The concept of credit scoring is basically a chain-based credit scoring, so you can make low-collateral loans. I think this is a big concept and hope it will appear soon. Natural person proof is the basis of identity. It is not identity, these 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 human proof is like building blocks for all these things to happen.

Sam Altman: I think it's too early to discuss specific details now, but as we observe this process over the next decade, I hope it will become apparent.

Bankless: How is Worldcoin actually distributed? How does it reach people's hands? What is the distribution plan like? How can I get WLD? How much can I get? What are the details?

Alex Blania: There are many details that we cannot discuss here due to regulatory uncertainty in the United States. So we will not delve into the details here, but the overall mechanism is very simple. You download an application, verify through an orb, and then at a certain point in time, you will receive your natural person proof, after which you will receive WLD every week. The entire system is built on this foundation and can be expanded to billions of people. This situation will continue for the next decade or so.

Bankless: Will early recipients of your Worldcoin ID receive incentives?

Alex Blania: The entire process is not only related to Worldcoin ID. At the time of release, Worldcoin includes three parts that we have discussed: Worldcoin, World ID, and World Dapp. Worldcoin is a protocol aimed at expanding to all of humanity, which we have never seen before because there has never been citizen resistance. What will be more important in the next ten years? Tokens or 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's Orb, which is a cutting-edge hardware component in and of itself. There's the token, which has its own cutting-edge distribution mechanism. There's a mobile application. And there's actual scanning work. And we haven't even talked about the second layer built on the OP stack, which has many moving parts. So, what does it feel like to manage a startup that needs to excel in so many areas?

Alex Blania: This is indeed a crazy journey. Because people always forget that at the beginning, we only had four people. We had just graduated from college, so we had never worked anywhere before. Now it is a huge team of 180 people, distributed in different fields, working together to achieve this goal. As you said, we have a fairly mature hardware team, protocol team, economic team, and artificial intelligence team. There are many things here, many moving parts. So this is definitely a quite exciting experience. Then over time, it shifted from early focus on hardware to focus on products, and now it is focused on operations. So it will become a huge operating machine.

Sam Altman: It's really cool to see how the Worldcoin team is rising up to new challenges. One of my favorite things about startups is watching people learn how much they can accomplish and how much they can do, especially for small teams. I don't remember who I first heard say this, but there's a somewhat famous saying in startups that if you knew how hard it was going to be, you'd never start. So a little bit of naivete at the beginning is important. Smart, motivated, and cohesive small teams can do so much more than they realize. But even so, the Worldcoin team has definitely exceeded expectations.

Bankless: Sam, are you more involved in the day-to-day operations of the WorldCoin project? Perhaps not on a daily basis, but where do you have points of contact with WorldCoin?

Sam Altman: Whatever Alex needs, I will do my best to help. But this seems to be quite different, and I will try to provide assistance wherever possible.

WorldCoin and Optimism Partnership

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 didn't announce the OP stack Layer 2. We will certainly do our own Layer 2 at some point, but not at launch, which will come later this year. Why choose Optimism? In fact, they have given us a lot of feedback on the entire technology stack over the past few months. Just two months ago, we decided we had to strengthen this and really start working together. Of course, it starts with migration, but it goes far beyond that. We will collaborate on identity primitives, including Base. So yes, many things will happen. So the simple implementation is to put WorldCoin on Optimism. That's the beginning.

Bankless: So does that mean WorldCoin will also be using 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 located on the Ethereum mainnet, and users can provide inclusion proofs for it. Then this will bridge to different ecosystems. So this is not just the case for Ethereum. WLD will be issued on the OP mainnet, and later this year, we will have our own Layer2.

WorldCoin's Expansion Strategy

Bankless: So far, how many irises have been scanned? How many people have obtained WorldCoin ID? What has been the strategy so far?

Sam Altman: Of course. As of May 14th, it was 1.7 million. All of this is just a start for us. So now it's 210 devices. Most of the time, there are only about 50 devices, mainly because we have 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 in public with an Orb? Is this really effective? 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 I went around Berlin registering users with these devices. I remember my colleague Sandro, who completed 70 registrations in one day. With those 70 registrations per day, we completed our Series A funding round. Because if you take 70 registrations per day and multiply it by a week, you get three times that, meaning 300 to 500 registrations per week at the time. This meant that tens of thousands of devices were enough to scale to billions. This was one of the surprising things at the time. Since then, it's been like the early concept validation of the first stage. Then in the second stage, we globalized it. We had 15 devices and we tried to deploy them in different markets around the world to see if there were any fundamental barriers we didn't know about. So we started from Tromsø, Norway, where the capacitors exploded because it was too cold, to Nairobi, Kenya, to Latin America, all of which were completed during COVID. So it was a rather tortuous journey. Some of our team members had to cross five different countries before finally reaching the country they really wanted to go to, because of COVID. Recently, we now have O-Pacific, a more professional team in this area. We focus on four markets: Buenos Aires, Argentina, Lisbon, Portugal, Nairobi, Kenya, and Bangalore and Delhi, India. These four markets are perfect launch platforms for larger regions. So if you want to build a product, these four regions are where we think you should start. So we basically send our product team to all four locations. I try to go there as much as possible and we'll expand from there.

Bankless: You can't hire every Orb operator to cover the world's population, right? So how do you spread Orb to different parts of the world and make it accessible to operators? Do you hire every Orb operator? What is the strategy here?

Alex Blania: No, the larger part actually has to be a decentralized protocol. So this is not a strategy. The way it works is that when you operate an Orb, you will receive income from each registration from the protocol. In short, there are also many incentive mechanisms.

Bankless: Is Orb itself a consortium project?

Alex Blania: In a sense, yes. There are many incentive mechanisms behind it to truly make it work, but that's the direction it's heading. Then, the Worldcoin Foundation basically just sets the standards, and others will be able to produce their own hardware devices and connect to the protocol. This is just the first stage of the big process, estimated to take 10 years to complete decentralization. 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: Fun. Orb has actually become a commercial product that anyone willing to participate can create. There is also some financial incentive from the protocol to encourage Orb creators to make Orbs. So, what are the learning lessons for Orb operators at the grassroots level? What is it like to manage these people as they are not actual members of the company?

Sam Altman: Now we have a team that has worked for companies like Airbnb and Uber. They bring a lot of experience on how to operate these decentralized models. There are many issues regarding quality control and fraud detection that we don't need to delve into. But another thing is to give users as much power as possible, so we try to incorporate as many features as possible into the application and educate users as much as possible before registration.

Bankless: Yes. I think humans have never seen such a scalable project. Alex, where do you think we are in the WorldCoin roadmap? How much work is left?

Alex Blania: Sam said that the progress and specialization of WorldCoin exceeded expectations, so we may be slightly ahead on the roadmap. We are still in the early stages of this large project, and there is still a lot of work to be done to achieve global coverage. However, we have made good progress so far and laid the foundation for subsequent 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 decentralized and incentive mechanism also needs time to develop. So there is still a long way to go, but the outlook is positive. By continuing to focus on users and staying agile, we can achieve the ultimate vision.

Sam Altman: There is still three and a half orders of magnitude growth ahead of us. It's not very early to say now. I remember when the Worldcoin project first appeared, the crypto industry completely mocked it. I think this is a natural reaction, like putting your iris in this sphere and then you can get some tokens. But one thing I noticed is that it attracted talent in a way that I haven't seen in other projects. There have been many people, in fact, I have had two such experiences in my social environment, where someone from Worldcoin would pull out an Orb. People inside Worldcoin really like these spheres. So the Worldcoin team continued to build, iterate, and attract some talent, attracting some builders, thinkers, and developers that I respect who were not previously in the Worldcoin team.

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: Actually, we didn't want to announce it at that time. There was a very annoying journalist who leaked the news, forcing us to respond. So I remember very clearly that we were a very small team at the time. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I lost my student visa and we were stuck in a small town called Erlangen in Germany. I remember receiving an email from a Bloomberg journalist around 11 pm on a Friday night. The email said that if you don't respond, we will report this. So everything went crazy. Everyone said that Sam Altman was going to launch this project. So more than a dozen people were trapped in a small village in Germany, trying to deal with all of this. This was the earliest stage. But then, as you said, we attracted incredible talent and became one of the best teams in this field. Then, a flywheel effect began to occur, and people outside the company also became excited about it.

Bankless: The past few weeks have been incredibly surreal as we've gained immense excitement and attention. What are your thoughts, Sam?

Sam Altman: The impact wasn't as great for me because I've 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 Twitter too much because I thought it wasn't healthy to do so, but one day I logged in and spent a long time scrolling through what they were saying. I thought, this is really a very personal attack.

Bankless: Sam, have you encountered similar situations in 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 inside the sphere and zero-knowledge proofs, some people simply cannot accept the privacy argument. If they don't like it, they don't have to register. I think this is important and must be emphasized consistently.

Bankless: That's right. I talked about this interview in the recent Bankless newsletter, where I mentioned having breakfast with members of Worldcoin and seeing an Orb decoration on the table, which was quite interesting. Some people were shocked that Bankless was talking to people from Worldcoin, so there are some extreme views out there...

Alex Blania: Yes, you can imagine, I have had many conversations like this. I think in 99% of the conversations, the answer is usually that the other person actually did not read the document, or did not try to understand what is happening. If you really explain the details carefully, you can usually calm the other person down. The bigger problem is that you actually don't need to trust us now or in the future, because many things have already been open sourced. We often receive this kind of feedback, 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 the pros and cons. So, don't trust us. Read the documents, read the code. If you find anything unsatisfactory, literally, communicate with us and we will find a way to solve the problem.

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 recruiting in various fields. From products to AI, everything is needed. In our case, this is not AGI, but edge neural networks used to detect various fraudulent attacks. So this requires different skills, of course. But it is indeed in all aspects. If you are good at operations or technology, please contact us.

Discussion on AI

Bankless: Can you briefly talk about your stance on the AI debate?

Sam Altman: First, we need to make more technological progress. We have developed a roadmap that outlines how we believe we will solve this problem. But it is indisputable that we need new technologies beyond LHF (language model fine-tuning). I don't understand why some people say that adjusting the problem is solved because we have LHF. It's definitely not like that, and I want to make it very, very clear. So there is still a lot of work to be done in that area.

Secondly, I believe that once we have the technical ability to adjust 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 now laying the groundwork for this.

Thirdly, how do we limit the abuse of AI? The misuse of AI by humans will cause tremendous damage or harm to society. Therefore, the rules for these limitations need to be discussed and formulated.