There are all kinds of societal concerns emerging out of the rise of artificial intelligence. Will it put us all out of work? Will fraudsters be able to use deepfakes — technology that can replicate our images and our voices — to scam us? We're in uncharted territory and nobody knows for sure how society will negotiate these risks. While many people are familiar with ChatGPT, its founder Sam Altman also co-founded Worldcoin, which aims to mitigate these risks. Enter: The Orb, an eyeball-scanning device that could provide everyone with a unique personal identifier. Think a global social security number, except you never have to share what it is with anyone. On this episode, we speak with Alex Blania, the CEO and co-founder of Tools For Humanity, the developer behind the Orb and the Worldcoin project, on his company's vision for how this tech can be used for things like proving one's humanness or collecting a Universal Basic Income in a world where AI predominates. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Key insights from the pod:
It’s time to worry about AI gakes — 5:44
How did Worldcoin come to be? — 7:21
What does the orb do? — 11:19
Why does the orb exist? — 13:36
How do you establish proof and database controversy — 20:06
What it was like pitching this to VCs — 20:54
Why have a crypto component at all? — 28:04
Who controls the orb tech? — 30:06
Worldcoin onboardng process — 32:00
What could go wrong: 34:38
What does adoption look like? — 40:15
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Joe Weisenthal: (00:00)
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.
Tracy Alloway: (00:16)
And I'm Tracy Alloway.
Joe: (00:17)
Tracy, do you remember a few weeks ago, or maybe a couple months ago now, someone made like a fake AI version of the Odd Lots podcast and they replicated our voice and stuff like that?
Tracy Alloway: (00:27)
Oh, yes. I think they used ChatGPT to do it. And they basically asked ChatGPT create a script for Odd Lots. And then they had someone replicate — another app or something — replicate the voices.
Joe: (00:40)
It wasn't a someone, I mean it was some other AI app…
Tracy: (00:45)
It was pretty good.
Joe: (00:40)
It was like good. I mean it clearly like was not us.
Tracy : (00:48)
How much did it worry you, Joe?
Joe : (00:49)
I think I'm more of an AI doomer worrier than you are.
Tracy : (00:53)
Interesting. I mean, I have concerns, don't get me wrong, but what do you think is the worst case scenario? Is it robots taking over the world?
Joe : (01:01)
No. I think that like in a couple of years, the AI will do a really good job of making the Odd Lots podcast and people will say, I don't really need to listen to Joe and Tracy anymore. The AI is, I don't know … but I feel like maybe that's a little paranoid.
Tracy : (01:16)
No, I feel like there is reason for concern. I hope -- maybe I'm just being an optimist here -- I hope we are a few years away from the Odd Lots replicants.
Joe : (01:24)
I know, but I want to like do this for another 30 years and I don't want to just have like three or four years or a few years.
Tracy : (01:29)
That’s the optimistic scenario is it? Doing this in 30 years’ time? Okay. All right. AI, lots of people expressing some worries about it.
Joe: (01:37)
A million different kind of worries, yeah.
Tracy: (1:39)
And we see all these, you know, good ways that the technology is being used, but also insidious ways. As you pointed out, someone made an Odd Lots episode, I think that was in a very fun spirited way, a nice way, but there are people who use this technology for more nefarious things.
Joe : (01:57)
Yeah, I think there was a 60 Minutes recently where someone was able to impersonate someone's voice and say “Hey, you know,” you could imagine a scam where someone's like, kids say, Hey, I need money.” Or something like that. And they call and it sounds just like them, especially in a couple years when the tech gets better and it becomes a bit of a crisis in the sense it's like, do I know that a person is a Person when they talk to me on a Zoom, when they talk to me on a podcast, when they talk to me on a phone call, etc.
Tracy: (02:24)
Well, even on Twitter, on a much more basic level, you have all these bots. And I don't know about you, but there seems to be a new Tracy Alloway with the ‘l’ as like an ‘I’ and fooling everyone, almost like every few weeks. And then you have to go through the whole bureaucracy of reporting to Twitter and proving that you are in fact the original Tracy Alloway.
Joe: (02:45)
Not to get on too much of a tangent. But wasn't Elon going to solve this because he said “Oh, I'm buying Twitter to solve the bots problem.” And I don't, and as you say, it's not been solved.
Tracy: (2:54)
I think that's a whole other episode.
Joe: (2:55)
But even with really rudimentary, you know, fake Tracys and fake Joes, like that's the most rudimentary thing -- just taking our avatar and like changing like one of the ‘ls’ in Tracy Alloway to like an ‘I’ or whatever, that's just going to get worse..
Tracy: (03:12)
You know what's a really good business model? Creating a problem and then creating the solution to it.
Joe: (03:21)
Yes, that's exactly right. So we have all of these AIs and they're going to replicate us and they're going to look like us and they're going to talk like us. But the good news, in a sense, ‘good’ is that others are working on the problem of how do you prove that you are who you are in a world in which AIs can replicate our voices and our faces and our expressions.
Tracy: (03:42)
Technology can save us from technology is the thrust of this, right?
Joe: (03:47)
Exactly. So we are going to be speaking to someone working on a technology designed to address this concern, in part. And as you say, some of the people working on it are some of the same people behind some of the most cutting edge AI research that's sort of blowing everyone's minds in both good and scary ways these days.
Tracy: (04:07)
So I'm just going to go ahead and lay out my priors here, which are that I find this sort of instinctively dystopian, the topic of this podcast, what we're going to be discussing. This technology creeps me out a little bit. But that said, I don't know that much about it. I don't know much about how it works, and so I am very interested to hear the bull case on eyeball scanning.
Joe: (04:30)
Okay, so you just jumped right (into it). We are going to be talking eyeball scanning. We are going to be speaking with Alex Blania. He is the co-founder of World Coin, an entity that was set up also by Sam Altman, a name that everybody knows now because he's the co-founder or the founder of OpenAI, which powers ChatGPT and other tools, other co-founder Max Novendstern. We are going to be talking about how an eyeball scanner can allow us to theoretically prove our humanity in this future AI world.
So Alex, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.
Alex Blania: (05:06)
Thank you for having me. I'm excited to talk.
Joe: (05:08)
So I'm trying to think, I mean, the threat, how real is it that? You know, in a few years do you think not whether AI will be able to create a perfect replica of the podcast, but that, let's say we're having this conversation and I might really not know that I am talking to the real Alex Blania versus an AI that can perfectly replicate your voice and replicate your face. Is that two years away? Is that three years away? How soon is that coming?
Alex: (05:44)
Well, I think partially we are already there, right? The technology's not completely open source yet, so you don't have widely deployed systems that can do that. But rather you have, right now you have a few entities that actually can do things like that or would be able to do things like that. But this is going to change because of course the progress is, is increasing.
So you had, it started with DALL-E, you had stable diffusion and many other things that on the image generation side became increasingly impressive. And I think AI art is one of the coolest things of the last year, to be honest. So that's on the image generation side of things.
And then of course you have ChatGPT on the text generation side of things. So I think on Twitter, as you discussed in the introduction, you are, I think, already there that it could happen. That you just chat with a neural network and you have absolutely no idea that you chat with a neural network and you might argue about Odd Lots for like an hour and don't realize that this is, AI probably.
Joe: (6:48)
We probably have.
Tracy: (06:49)
I know, I'm just thinking like half the people I argue with on Twitter probably are bots. Well, maybe just to step back in time a little bit, I mean, Worldcoin has been around for a few years now, and to some degree, as Joe mentioned, you guys kind of anticipated this threat. What was the sort of ‘aha’ moment that made this all come together? How did this actually develop into a company and what was the use case thesis when you were just setting out?
Alex: (07:21)
Well, we honestly did not, we didn't start off to solve a threat. Right? That is not…Kind of brief history in time. Back then I did, I did research. So we started the company a little bit over three years ago and I was doing research in deep learning applied to quantum physics. So I basically predicted, okay, quantum system of neural networks and that's kind of, I think, a very promising field in physics.
And Sam was already working on the idea of Worldcoin together with Max. So I think they've already been on it for like six months. But of course, Sam had a full-time job at OpenAI. Max had a full-time job back then, so it was all like in an early idea phase.
Then I got an email from Max back then, with like an early paper describing the vision of Worldcoin, and that I should come by and talk and then. Had a couple interviews with Max, one with Sam. We spent a lot of time together and actually decided to proceed.
But to go back to the initial proposition, and I think that is very important and it's not about solving a threat, but rather how, I mean, Sam was already bootstrapping OpenAI and this was three years ago, so back then it was not yet an accepted topic that AI is going to happen and it's going to be as powerful as it is today.
It was like a very niche topic, I think although OpenAI of course was already quite a famous entity, but of course Sam was motivated by the idea of AI and what it's going to do to the world and it's going to be this very powerful technology.
And so the initial proposition of Worldcoin, was really what is the societal infrastructure that we can build that makes sure that AI is for the better of all of society versus a few. And so there's many things actually that come together here, like proof of personhood, is what you just described, is the ability to prove that you're an actually human being on the internet, which is basically just a much more capable identity system.
But it goes as far as we think eventually UBI will become a thing and it actually is like a big chance if you have a very, very powerful technology and it's not about kind of political redistribution, but you have a very centralizing technology that you want to share the upside with the world with. And that was another motivation, kind of Worldcoin can actually be the infrastructure to do that because you have a very capable identity system. You have an economic system that connects everyone.
So there were like a couple of very ambitious reasons why we think something like that. So basically creating and bootstrapping the largest identity and financial network that is actually open and privacy preserving versus relying on centralized government systems that might not work in a large part of the world is a very important proposition for the coming decades.
Joe: (10:19)
So let's just jump right to it. People who are listening to this podcast, you might want to actually watch the video version. We're recording this on video as well. But here on set, I'm just going to wait a little while before unveiling it, but this is, I'm holding in my hand a big orb.
Tracy: (10:39)
I feel like we need extra music as this comes up.
Joe: (10:41)
It feels about six pounds. I don't know how, how heavy is this? Alex, I'm sure you know the exact weight.
Alex: (10:47)
It’s a little bit over one kilogram,
Joe: (10:50)
Oh, okay. So I was wrong, so that's just under like two and a half pounds. Okay, that's fine. About two and a half pounds and it's an eyeball scanner and so here it is. And it's not working right now, or we're not scanning right now.
So I can like tilt this in our faces. It's not scanning, but let's talk about what this piece of hardware that I'm actually holding. I'm going to set it on the table in front of me. It is an eyeball scanner. What does it do?
Alex: (11:19)
So the short answer is one -- I'll start with the short and then the longer answer. The short answer is that it first ensures that whatever is interacting with the device is an actually human being. So, not a display
Joe: (11:32)
Not a photograph of an eyeball...
Alex: (11:33)
Not a photograph or like more sophisticated optical attacks because there's many things you could, you could do here. So that's the first step. Checking that whatever we see as an actual human being.
And then the second piece, is it takes an image of my eye, calculates a unique embedding out of this picture. Everything happens on a device and that embedding then is signed by the device and that's then the only thing that actually leaves the device and gets compared against all other users. And if that uniqueness check is successful, then me that I just verified with an orb, I then can later do a zero knowledge proof that I am included in that set.
And if you're not familiar with your knowledge proofs, what it allows you to do is it lets you prove something without actually revealing the underlying information. So what that enables us to do is it builds a self, like essentially a self custodial identity network where the data control is with the user, and there's no centralized entity that actually has the information of who you are, where you're from, all of these things, but rather, this person is a unique human being and has verified with Worldcoin before.
While the user could decide to attach more information to that, so that's kind of the short of it. I think we should talk much more about the ‘why?’ in a second, because that's not trivial, but, but yeah.
Tracy: (13:05)
Yeah. Maybe just to help us get to the ‘why?’ you could talk about what would be a practical use case for this technology, because if I think about something like, you know, you mentioned UBI -- Universal Basic Income -- if I think a government starts some sort of UBI program, then I would assume that they identify people by something like a social security number or whatever the equivalent might be in that country. So what does this do that those traditional systems of identity do not?
Alex: (13:36)
Well, so when you start with traditional identity, the really hard thing for governments is actually making sure everyone only has one password, and that is with an identity it’s called deduplication.
It's a really hard problem because all the systems, all the technologies you use, usually in your life, let's say your iPhone Face ID, what that actually does is just, it reauthenticates you. So it realizes I'm the same person again, logging into that phone. And that's a one-to-one comparison and that is fairly easy to do
What is really hard to do is making sure, okay, Alex did not sign up compared to a billion other people. And so that's why many governments actually have biometric systems in place, because otherwise also their social security number system would completely break. But that's not rolled out globally.
So in fact, a good mental model is about 50% of the global population actually have a digitally verifiable identity. That's a huge number of people that just don't have it. Right. And so I think United States is pretty good or at least decent. It's actually not a really good identity solution.
Europe, in parts, is pretty capable. The strongest is India, although there's definitely privacy concerns here because they don't use knowledge proofs and things like that. But for example, India, they have a program called Aadhaar that also used iris recognition to kind of roll out to the global population, and it really accelerated a whole economy like crazy.
So they had Aadhaar and then they built UPI on top, which is a payment rail. And so whenever you talk to people that are in that kind of area of technology, everyone always brings up India as the most prominent example of like what identity plus a strong financial rail can actually do to accelerate an economy.
So, and this is what Worldcoin is doing, basically Worldcoin is able to create a deduplication set. So it provides me with the ability to prove that I'm actually unique against everyone else. But then also there's world ID, which is an identity protocol on top of that, and let's start with the basics.
So the first thing I could do is I could log into Twitter and I could say I don't already have a Twitter account without actually revealing my name. And then if you think a little bit forward, you could even cryptographically sign every tweet you make so that you kind of lay a trace of like, okay, this is actually Alex versus anyone else.
And I think this is really where this is, is going to go, right? Because this progress around AI is definitely an exponential. So we will get to a place where you will have to authenticate pretty much everything you do on the internet. So that's the basic, but then with World ID, which is a protocol that lets you add verifiable credentials and many other things, with an identity space, you can actually bootstrap a whole identity system on top. So this was like a quick rant.
Joe: (16:39)
It's good.
Tracy: (16:41)
So it's not that it's proving that you are, you know, a Joe Weisenthal or a Tracy Alloway, it's proving that there is only one of you without necessarily the ID attached or the name attached?
Alex: (16:53)
That is it exactly. So that is the I whole point. Because then what World ID lets you do, so if you're not into crypto, but this whole idea of self custody is very important, right? Of course, I'm pretty sure it came up before. What that lets you do is you basically, you verify for, well, can you receive your World ID and then it might be that for some applications, you actually want to prove that you are over 18 or you're Joe Weisenthal.
Then the World ID protocol, which is literally just like an open source protocol, and every developer, every company could implement with that you as a user really can then decide to also attach additional information to your World ID, so that is my name, or that is my K C information.
And then you can decide to reveal that to some applications with zero knowledge proof as well. But no one other than you actually has that information.
Joe: (17:51)
So I think, God, I have like hundreds of questions, there's so many different ways. So, you know, one basic (question), but one I idea you keep mentioning zero knowledge proofs just to sort of … The basic idea, and this is the short, is like, you know, when I go to websites, sometimes government websites, you’re entering your social security number. But the idea is with a zero knowledge proof, it would be I prove to the government that I know my social security number without telling the government what my social security number is?
Alex: (18:21)
Well, I mean, that one is actually tricky because in that case, you would reveal the social security number. What is a much better way to explain it is, the website asks you, are you on any kinds of sanction list? Or are you over 18 or are you actually a citizen?
And then these things you could proof with zero knowledge. And then basically what comes out of this is like a proof runs under your phone that you are not included in a sanctions list, let's say. And that the only thing that comes out and ends up with the website is ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ but the website does not know what is the social security number you checked against.
Joe: (19:22)
So then the other question I have, and the obvious thing is, look, scanning your eyeball, it's going to make anyone anxious. And I'm totally up for it. And even I'm like, you know, a little bit anxious about it. How do you establish so there's no, unlike say, CLEAR at the airport, which also uses an eyeball scan so that you can go by security, there's no centralized database of our irises.
And how do you sort of establish or prove to people that there's no database? Because if my understanding (is correct), there has been reporting that at least at some point in the process of the development of Worldcoin, as you've grown as a startup, that at one point, or at least currently, there was an iris database.
Alex: (20:06)
Okay, so there, there's many things here. I'm going to start with explaining how to develop comfort around the idea and why it's necessary. So first of all, I hated the idea of building the orb, when we actually started working at Worldcoin like, it was absolutely horrific because it was, we had been four people sitting in a smart small apartment in San Francisco, and the idea of building hundred devices that takes biometric data and roll them out globally was a horrific idea back then. One, because it's very complicated, expensive. And then…
Tracy: (20:41)
I imagine pitching that one to VCs would be kind of tricky, right?
Alex: (20:45)
Oh, it was. It was, it was horrific. It was in the middle of, it was also like, I mean, Worldcoin is also crypto project and we started,
Tracy: (20:53)
Yeah, I want to ask you about that too.
Alex: (20:54)
Yeah, we started in like the middle of a bear market. So I remember back then when we talked to the first investors, they're like, “okay, other than Ethereum or Bitcoin, nothing will exist. All of this nonsense. What do you talk about? AI also, no one cares about that. Also, like what are you even doing?”
But again, so neither me or anyone else was really excited about building a device. But really we spent almost a year doing research in pretty much everything you could do to solve the problem, right? And solving the problem is, okay, issuing a privacy-preserving identity that works globally, not only in the United States, not only in Europe. What do we have to do?
And there's basically three big answers to this. One is you use government KYC, right? Which might be a sufficient answer for some parts of the world, but it was pretty shocking to realize for how few, right? So kind of that very quickly disqualified.
Second is what people call web of trust, so this whole idea that you're just like, you build reputation up between people and that also in short, just didn't work.
And then the third is biometrics and everything that surrounds that whole field. And within biometrics, we then built prototypes for pretty much everything you could imagine. We built palm scanners, we built kind of a Face ID-like implementation of it. We build fingerprint scanners, all these things.
But the short of it is, to solve this deduplication problem, so this uniqueness check, you need a lot of entropy. So information about each user. If you don't have that, your error rate explodes exponentially. And so, simple example, if you would use Face ID to solve the same problem, after tens of millions of users, you would have to reject everyone. So you don't have a constant error rate. You don't have like 5% constantly reject, but you just hit a wall and your system breaks. And so face doesn't work. Sameis true for fingerprints.
And the only thing that really works is -- and is proven to work – is iris recognition. So that's why we ended up there. And then even with an iris recognition, we even had to build our own hardware. We had to build our own lens, which sounds absolutely ridiculous, but we kind of had to build this whole device from the ground up to make that happen.
So much to the ‘why?’ And how do we get people, or how do we think about this whole headline of comfort around this? There's a couple things. One, actually build a privacy-preserving system that goes way further than what you're used to, alright. And that's I think, really what we did because there is no information about you that you actually reveal by using Worldcoin.
And I think that's pretty remarkable. It's definitely counterintuitive because you're like, okay, we use eyeball scanning. But, so this is headline one, headline two, and that's a journey for sure, is open sourcing everything, right?
So this, I think, that's one of the core parts of the crypto ethos is just you don't have to trust, but rather you can verify. The hardware is completely open source already. The software to meaningful parts, the protocol completely. So everything will be open source in the coming months.
And so that's answer two and then three, it actually is way less of a thing than you would think. So we have now 1.7 million users, roughly 600,000 of them, that use the app on a monthly basis. I travel the world very frequently, I talk to a lot of users on the ground and just try to understand what's kind of, what's your feeling? What do you understand, what you have to understand?
And it is very much, yeah, broadly speaking, globally speaking, this is way less of a concern which obviously does not lower our bar, but it's the case.
Tracy: (25:07)
So I have two things on that, and I think they're sort of related, but one, why does opensource seem to be such a thing in AI in particular. And then secondly, what is the crypto role in this project because, you know, we mentioned Worldcoin. I can only imagine what it was like pitching to VCs in the midst of a crypto bear market saying “We want to scan everyone's eyeballs. And oh, by the way, there's also like a crypto element to this as well, a token.” Why have that component of it?
Alex: (25:41)
I mean, at this point, I'm actually not an AI expert anymore because I think I'm basically two years out of the field and went into crypto, which is an interesting journey also. But…
Tracy: (25:52)
But soon you'll be going back into AI, probably. That's what all the crypto people are doing now, right?
Alex: (25:57)
Well, no comment.
Tracy: (26:00)
Sorry, I'm joking. I'm joking.
Alex: (26:03)
So why is open sourcing such a thing? It is basically around AI specifically, it is that you have a technology that is probably as foundational as electricity, as literally, like, it's still, I think, incomprehensible to people what a big deal this is, right?
This is one of the biggest paradigm shifts in technology that happened ever, and there are different approaches of how to deal with this and all the underlying risks. And basically two different lines of thought, one is you open source, everything, everyone should be able to verify and understand how everything is happening. And then the other is, well, you actually kind of have to lock down these models because if it ends up in the wrong hands, then malicious actors have a lot of power.
And I think, I mean, OpenAI is definitely kind of in the center of discourse because it started with open sourcing and then the team realized throughout the years that actually this whole premise of open sourcing is probably a terrible idea. So that's why it's a discuss discussion within AI.
Within crypto, it is just that the whole thesis of crypto is that you build actual protocols, not companies. So you build systems that are not dependent on a small group of people, can be completely verified and can run over decades without being interrupted. And that's open source is just like the core of this together with decentralization.
So I think that's AI and crypto. I actually do think with an AI, it's a very overblown discussion. I think with crypto, it's the core thesis almost.
Tracy: (27:50)
And so the crypto element with Worldcoin, as I understand it, is to insert a degree of, I guess, community control over that technology, right? There's some talk about the tokens coming with voting rights and things like that?
Alex: (28:04)
There are so many things there actually. One is I think crypto and that's something that is, if you're not kind of deeply in the space, that is hard to kind of realize what a big deal it is. But it is this idea that tokens build business models for networks almost, right?
So you don't have a company, but rather you have like, let's let's say Ethereum. Ethereum is a very powerful protocol, but it has kind of an underlying business model. But it's not that Vitalik (Buterin) gets rich by that. It is…
Joe: (28:42)
No, he did.
Alex: (28:04)
Well, he did. But because he was early, not because now he still makes money, right? It's not that the company's printing money and then Vitalik gets rich every month, but rather, okay, you have a token and you have a fee structure and as the utility increases, the network can basically sustain itself, right?
So it can sustain its security, it can sustain its operation and things like that. And so you basically find a way how you fund a decentralized operation and can it let it sustain over time. And that is one of the big core things here is you build very, like when Worldcoin works, it's really foundational infrastructure.
I think without being overconfident, I think it's a very big deal because it's a very foundational piece of technology. It just doesn't exist right now. That should not be in the hands of a few people, but rather it should be governed by a wider group of people and it should actually be decentralized. So also that it cannot break just if I'm in a bad mood, let's say. That would be terrible.
Tracy: (29:48)
So instead of having a centralized actor who controls the orb -- which is a sentence I didn't think I would say today -- you have this decentralized group of investors/stakeholders. Is that how it works?
Alex: (30:06)
Yep. This like sparks a whole other part of conversation, but basically how it works is, so the orb is an open source hardware device. Right now the company that I'm CEO of -- Tools for Humanity -- is the only one that produces these orbs, but this will change. So you will have, like, if you fast forward two, three years in the future, you're going to have many companies that produce their implementation of the orb following the same standards that connect to the Worldcoin protocol basically...
Joe: (30:37)
So Apple could produce an orb theoretically.
Alex: (30:39)
Yeah. Apple, Microsoft, whatever. They could produce their own orb, follow their own standards, make it, design it the way they want but it will connect to the protocol and that will allow for just a very foundational protocol on the internet that everyone can use, that doesn't break. And the token distributes the governance and also the incentive mechanisms all around the same goal.
Joe: (31:24)
So, I mean, you talked about the importance of like, okay, if this is going to be this foundational infrastructure that everyone uses in some way to verify themselves or whatever, and also is the sort of rails perhaps for some Universal Basic Income that we all need. Because, you know, AI is going to put half of us out of jobs in theory. Like, okay, it's better be not just controlled -- no offense -- by Alex Blania and Sam Altman. That'd be kind of weird. But how do we know that's not the case? And I want to go back to a question I asked specifically about, in the past, have you had a iris database?
Alex: (32:00)
So how it works is, and that's not a secret, basically when you verify with Worldcoin, go to the flow. So let's say you hear about Worldcoin, you're excited about it, whatever, you want to sign up.
You download an app. Right now there's only one app that lets you do that, but soon that also will change. So right now that app is called WorldApp. It's a non-custodial wallet. You click ‘verify now,’ a map pops up. Hopefully we are near you. You go to an orb and then you show a QR code, you open 30 seconds later. You receive your World ID and you also receive Worldcoin on a rolling basis. Every week you receive a small part of Worldcoin.
And in that signup flow, because we are in beta, we actually did not launch yet, right? The launch is something that is going to happen reasonably soon. That's also why we talk right now, why it's a very important moment in time for us there. You had two options. Opt-in or opt out. Opt out is basically, we don't have any data of you. Opt-in means we basically have custody of your data, for the reason that the neural networks that are on this device right now are still in development.
And so if you opt out, it could happen that you have to reify in a year or so because we basically just updated a model as we went. But where this is going is very clearly, and I think actually launch it will be completely opte out. This is just the nature of being in beta and developing the technology as we go.
Tracy: (33:39)
So I take the point that you're in beta at the moment, but you know, the arc of recent technological innovation seems to be that people often come up with something with the best of intentions or in order to solve an identified problem, and then it often gets used in the worst possible way. So what’s the terrible use case arc of this technology?
Because one thing that springs to mind and you know, we could talk about robot invasions and like Terminator-style AI takeovers, but one more realistic thing that would spring to mind is, okay. You set something like this up and then as you walk through a shopping mall, you know there's some other technology that's scanning your eyeballs, identifying who you are, and maybe pitching targeted ads or something like that. How do you separate the identity verification from companies using that for other purposes?
Alex: (34:38)
Yep. So we actually have a quite in-depth (inaudible) in the company right now in Tools for Humanity. And we will publish this as we go, that just like we try to come up with the worst, weirdest scenarios of like whatever, China's attacking the network with billions of dollars. What could actually happen? What could go wrong, right?
The thing is given zero knowledge proofs separate your wallet from the kind of the uniqueness check, the only thing that could happen -- and to be clear in some cases that actually, if you think 10 years in the future and you think this is very powerful technology that could actually be bad – is people could say “okay, that individual is verified with Worldcoin, yes or no.”
And that might like, you could definitely think of scenarios of, okay, China is banning Worldcoin because it's literally the antithesis of what they're building with their identity system because it's privacy-preserving. Then you might actually have, or it might be bad for you to be verified with Worldcoin or whatever, right?
So there's some scenarios here, but I think that's pretty much the worst case scenario you're looking at because otherwise the only... Like, let's go even to the far extreme, which to be very clear is not what is the case. But let's say there would be like a huge database of biometric images of all users. It's not connected to your actual account. So you still have the most, there's like multiple layers of privacy in between, that then make sure that nothing really bad is happening there.
Joe: (36:22)
Well, I'm going to go into a slightly macabre arc of this, or maybe sci-fi angle, but since we're just talking about bad things happening, I'm just going to go there, which is, eyeball theft. Someone cutting out, if a really important person who uses Worldcoin to verify themselves on some network, a criminal attacker, physically maiming someone. I imagine these sorts of scenarios.. -- or digging up the dead for their eyeballs -- these must come up in your conversations about really extreme scenarios? Can you talk about some of these sort of weird out-there physical risks?
Alex: (37:04)
Yeah. All of these signups would not work because the orb would realize that that person is, these irises are not alive and are not connected to an actual live body.
Tracy: (37:18)
This is the moment on Odd Lots when we talk about degenerating eyeball tissue.
Alex: (37:24)
I think we should stop this whole part of discussion but… (laughing)
Joe: (37:26)
No, no, no. I mean, I am really like, what is a liveness check? And I guess it goes back to your question of “why eyeballs are not thumbprints?” or why not fingerprints or Face ID or your gait or something. Talk to us about that verification, why an eyeball can't be replicated, why it wouldn't work if not attached to a live person. This must come up. This is what would freak me out.
Alex: (37:48)
Sure. So the device has multiple sensors in front. There's like a lot of compute on this device. There's like a separate GPU and there's seven neural networks that basically at all time run. And what a large part of these networks is doing is just to make sure that whatever we see is an actual human being alive, no fraud attack, no kind of weird cases. And then there is in front, there's multiple sensors that make sure that that's the case.
And you could even go as far as an AI trying to attack the system, because that can also happen in the future, right? So all of that should not happen. And so, what the orb does it images multi spectral. So what that means is across multiple wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum all at the same time. And this is just like, you can think of very sophisticated optical table attacks.
A lot of this physics (from) when I was younger, you can think of these things, but it's extremely expensive. And I think even that will not be possible in the future. So it's just really, really hard to fool this device. I mean, of course, to be clear, the infrastructure is there, like the neural networks are still, we are still building that up. So right now we are actually aware of a couple attacks that can still happen and that will still be the case for the next year.
All of this technology is not perfect yet, so it will still take time, but at least the technology is there to make sure that none of these attacks will ever go through.
Joe: (39:25)
Hmm.
Tracy: (39:25)
So setting aside the worst case scenarios, maybe a slightly easier question, but what is the path to adoption that you see here? Because there are a lot of things, it feels like, to overcome.
One is the creepiness factor of having your eyeballs scanned, but secondly, you know, if you're touting this as a way to identify people who might be in need of some sort of official identification in countries that don't necessarily have those systems yet or have subpar systems, I imagine like there has to be a reason why they would want to have this done. You know, in most places -- in almost all places in the world -- no one is getting Universal Basic Income yet. So what is the path to adoption and what are the incentives for people to do this?
Alex: (40:15)
Right. This is kind of the. The everything question. Like if of course if I would have the perfect answer to this, um, I would tweet it out. But that's a good question.
Tracy: (40:28)
That’s a good answer!
Joe: (40:30)
This could be the answer to every question we've ever asked. This is why we're worried about being replaced. Just tweet it out. Anyway, sorry. Keep going.
Alex: (40:39)
Okay, so there, there's a couple different arcs to the response to this question, right? So one is when we launch, there's going to be a token, a token with a capped supply that will play a very important role in kind of the whole evolving nature of this project.
And when you sign up, you basically receive, on a running basis, you receive ownership in a network through the token. And I think that's exciting for a lot of reasons. One, it's a direct incentive. You literally get money basically that you could sell or you could do anything with. So it's already like a very small form of, it's not basic because it's not enough money, but it's a small form of UBI in some sense. I think that will motivate a lot of people.
And we already see it's moving a lot of people to, we have the crazy, like literally right now is the craziest time for me running this project because it's blowing up -- like all the dashboards completely go vertical. And we have people flying from Japan to Portugal to sign up and whatever. It's pretty crazy. So that certainly does something that's one.
Two is of course integrations, so making sure that kind of large technology companies or services actually integrate with World ID. That's going to, I mean, it's going to take a while because you have a chicken and egg problem. You need a lot of users for that to be interesting to products and so on and so forth. So just like a little bit of a balancing act, but I'm sure it's going to happen. And once that is the case, once you have like major integrations, then kind of an actual flywheel is starting because as a user you will be able to use a lot of services that you're just not able to use without it.
And so that's kind of the short of it. And I have a lot more specific answers that are much more localized as well. So for example, we are in Buenos Aires, and so we'll work on local integrations in Argentina. So it, it will not start with Twitter or Meta. It'll start with very localized applications. But yeah, that's where it goes.
Joe: (42:59)
Since this is Odd Lots, I have a really quick question. You know, you built this, I'm going to pick it up again because it's really kind of fun, the orb. You built this piece of hardware, do you have any interesting supply chain issues in terms of the optics or the semiconductors? And how much is a right now cost to build an orb?
Alex: (43:21)
So we had, especially during Covid, we had crazy supply chain crunches. Like Elon talked a lot about this in the earlier days, but I definitely also ran into this. It's like you have a perfect running prototype and then it just feels trivial to produce this thing, but it's just not. It was absolutely terrific. Like, we had this prototype and then building up a production line and really being able to produce like thousands of them was a completely different challenge.
So that almost took like a year to completely lock this in. And then within Covid we had crazy supply chain issues, but that's now mostly gone. The industry has completely recovered.
Tracy: (44:05)
What was the hardest component to get?
Alex: (44:09)
Oh man, it was it was death by a thousand cuts. It was everything from the computing unit to random capacitors, we had ones that we use. We have like, the actual lens right now is single source supplier, which is something that obviously has to change. But since we customly had to build this lens, there's only one company in the world that builds that lens.
So that was a really tricky one to kind of ramp it up over time. How much does it cost right now? Right now is still, we are still pretty expensive. But honestly it doesn't really matter because, so right now it's like $4,000 to $5,000, depending on the exact batch. It's coming down to be around $1,500 at mass manufacturing. And I think in a couple years it's going to be below $500.
Tracy: (45:07)
That’s actually less than I would've thought.
Joe: (00:45:08)
We gotta put the orb into the Fed’s inflation basket. We're getting so much better at producing eyeball-scanning orbs.
Tracy: (45:15)
Yes. Healthcare and medical care, massively inflated. But we can all scan our eyeballs cheaper and cheaper at cheaper every year. Excellent.
Joe: (45:22)
Alex Blania, this was such a fascinating conversation. It's, I mean, there's like a million more things I could want to ask and maybe we'll have you back in a year. And then in two years when we're all on UBI, because we've been put out of work by AI and so, you know, whatever it is. But this was far and away our most sort of futuristic sci-fi-ish conversation we've ever had. Not something I would have ever contemplated in the past though. Thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.
Alex: (45:49)
Amazing. I take that as a compliment. Thanks for having me.
Joe: (46:08)
Tracy, are you going to get scanned?
Tracy: (46:11)
You know what, I think I'm going to wait a little bit until there's some visible upside for me, which is kind of that last question that I asked Alex, which, you know, I am reasonably, I understand the use case of having some sort of wallet or portable identification that you can take with you across the internet and various outlets. That kind of makes sense to me. And I think we've spoken about that use case before. However, at this point in time, I don't see a lot of upside you know, maybe it would be easier to file some claims against Twitter for bot copycats, but it's not much.
Joe: (46:51)
Yeah, and to your point though, or, sorry, to Alex's point, so it's on Twitter, do they want to integrate the Worldcoin API? Which I don't actually get the impression that like, it doesn't seem like any of the big networks are anywhere (close), that's on the roadmap of anyone right now.
Tracy: (47:09)
Well, this is the other thing I'm thinking about is, you know, part of the Worldcoin use case is this decentralization aspect of it. But what we've seen time and time again throughout history is that the world tends towards. middlemen and verification of some sort.
So I can imagine a future where maybe you do get your eyeball scanned, but maybe it's not by Worldcoin or a decentralized entity. Maybe it's Twitter itself, and, this is even more dystopian, you know, like Twitter keeps its own database of your eyeballs.
Joe: (47:43)
That’s the thing. I use CLEAR, you know, I already scan my eyeball at the airport and it's like “oh, it's a hundred dollars and that's a centralized database.” I save a few minutes. I've already, when it comes to privacy, I've already basically given up, I've already given it all up to save about five minutes.
So I guess I'm just like, yeah, you know, I'll get scanned. Why not? But I'm skeptical, you know, actually, honestly, it's not even like the privacy or anything like that, or like the dystopian scenarios, so much as, I don't really want a scenario in which computers put us all out of jobs and we need the UBI.
And I think we didn't really get into this scenario in the future, where will the political impulse on UBI come from? It'll come from, in an economy that's so lopsided, in who reaps the benefits of AI that we have to have it for political stability. That's the scenario that like freaks me out more than anything.
Tracy: (48:35)
Right. In the future where you really need WorldCoin, the most insidious thing is that you need it’s because no one has jobs.
Joe: (48:43)
That’s right. More than anything else, the scan, the whatever, it's this scenario in which like, “oh, I need to like get my UBI from somewhere and like they tap Sam Altman… That's the part -- more than the scan or the privacy or the, you know, the digging up the dead -- that freaks me out.
Tracy: (48:59)
Yeah. I'm telling you, great business model. Create the problem and the solution. On that happy note, shall we leave it there?
Joe: (49:05)
Let's leave it there.
You can follow Alex Blania on Twitter at @alexblania.