Oh wow. I forgot that was even a thing. Is that project dead? I assume it is, but would love to be surprised that it still exists, just for the novelty of the entire thing.

It's not merely still around, they're still actively hiring for it on LinkedIn.

It's still around afaik

Here it is: https://worldcoin.org/

OMG, they're so close to this jokingly (but with intent) modified mission statement:

> building the world’s largest identity and financial network [...] giving ownership of everyone.

I changed ONE word: where they wrote "to" I replaced it with "of".

They've been present with their strange shiny orb at my local shopping mall in Portugal for the last year or two, and are often at a busy train station nearby too.

I believe you mean "believes", not "believed". I don't think he has changed his mind on that.

I don't know Sama, but these actions don't give me a lot of faith. However, I am open to having my mind changed on that. It's too easy to target those in the ring.

Investment culture really rewards psychopathy. The word on the street in the San Francisco start-up scene is that Altman likes his boyfriends/hookups to be 18-20, which seems extremely predatory. There's a whole "gay mafia" rumor in the tech-venture capitalist funding world, and it's a way to get ahead.

Another thing that worries me is seeing multiple openAI founders on twitter making grand predictions about the future of AI instead of staying humble and keeping their head down and letting the product speak for itself. That is not how serious engineers usually talk, sounds more like wannabe monopolists to me.

Sounds like they're pumping their product.

It's important to note that WorldCoin does not get to see the retinas, whose picture never leave the orb (and are deleted after the fact), but only a hash of them. The orb's hardware blueprints and the software is open source too.

The system attempts to solve an important problem: figure out who's a human (not a robot) online. One could argue Sam is creating the problem as well as the solution, I suppose. Still, it's better than only having the problem.

Right now the problem does not seem extremely pressing, but I believe it might become more so.

Even if we don't see rampant abuse of AIs masquerading as humans, another ambition of WorldCoin is to perform wide-ranging experiments in UBI, and being able to distinguish "real" humans in that context is absolutely crucial. This goes doubly in the third world, where people often simply don't have IDs (and available forms of IDs can be easily manufactured through bribery).

(That being said, I broadly agree with the criticism of OpenAI laid out in the above article. Still, we can have nuance.)