On Monday, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, released a cryptocurrency called Worldcoin. The World ID, which the firm calls a “digital passport” to establish that its holder is a real human and not an AI bot, is the project’s central feature.
The ‘orb’ created by Worldcoin is a silver ball around the size of a bowling ball, and customers who want a World ID sign up to have their irises scanned with it in person. A World ID is generated after the orb’s iris scan confirms the user is a real human.
Worldcoin was created by Tools for Humanity
With the debut on Monday, Worldcoin is “orbing” operations to 35 cities in 20 nations, where it already has 2 million users from the beta stage. Sign-up bonuses in the form of Worldcoin’s cryptocurrency token, WLD, are available in some regions.
In Monday’s opening hours, WLD saw its price go up. After opening at $0.15, it reached a high of $5.29 on the largest cryptocurrency market, Binance, and was trading at $2.49 at 1000 GMT, with a total trading volume of $25.1 million.
Co-founder Alex Blania told Reuters that blockchains can be used to store World IDs in a way that protects user privacy and cannot be shut down by a central authority.
The initiative claims World IDs are essential in the era of remarkably humanlike language-generating AI chatbots like ChatGPT. Global identifiers may one day be used to distinguish between genuine users and automated software programs.
According to what Altman revealed to Reuters Worldcoin can also be used to deal with the economic changes brought on by generative AI. Supercharging people with AI would have huge financial ramifications, he predicted.
Universal basic income (UBI), a government-run social welfare program in which all citizens receive payments, is an example that Altman finds compelling. Since AI “will do more and more of the work that people now do,” UBI, in Altman’s view, is a viable tool for reducing income disparity. World IDs can only be obtained by genuine individuals, hence they might be used to combat UBI fraud.
Although Worldcoin creates the basis for UBI to become a reality, Altman stated he thought such a society was “very far in the future” and he did not have a clear sense of what institution could dole out money. The only way to figure out what to do, he added, is to start trying stuff out.
Anna Tong in San Francisco contributed reporting; Juby Babu and Elizabeth Howcroft contributed additional reporting; Kenneth Li, Shri Navaratnam, and Philippa Fletcher were responsible for editing.
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