Will the former partner of Musk, from ChatGPT to WorldCoin, bring surprises to Web3?

The explosion of ChatGPT has made Sam a rising star who has attracted much attention. How did Sam enter the encryption industry and create Worldcoin?

Written by: Huo Huo

The company behind the Worldcoin project announced on May 26 that it has raised $115 million in investment, led by Blockchain Capital, with participation from a16z, Bain Capital Crypto and Distributed Global. **And one of the founders of this project is OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (Sam Altman). **

The explosion of ChatGPT has made Sam a star who has attracted much attention. How did **Sam enter the encryption industry and create Worldcoin? **

Silicon Valley story template reinterpretation

Sam was born in April 1985 in a Jewish family in Chicago, USA. He had a great interest in computers since he was a child. He owned his first computer at the age of 8, and then fell in love with programming. At the age of 17, he finally entered Stanford University to major in computer science.

If what happened later can be summed up in one sentence, it would be that he dropped out of Stanford University to start a business at the age of 19. The company he founded, Loot, had a valuation of up to 170 million US dollars. At the age of 28, he became the president of the well-known startup incubation company Y Combinator (YC). At the age of 34, he gave up his position as president and devoted himself to the entrepreneurial journey of OpenAI full-time.

Source: admin

**It is simply a standard traditional Silicon Valley story template-"The road to success of dropouts from prestigious schools", which is consistent with the stories of Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg, etc. who dropped out of school, started their own businesses, and played cards out of common sense. **

Sam at Loopt's office in 2007, source: The New York Times

From chatGAT to Worldcoin

In fact, ChatGPT originated when Sam was the president of YC. As the president of a top venture capital institution, Sam met many giants in the technology industry, one of which was Musk.

**In 2015, Sam and Musk hit it off and founded the artificial intelligence company OpenAI together. The goal is to build a non-profit, human-friendly artificial intelligence (AI), and then release its source code to the world for sharing. benefit mankind. **

However, in 2018, Musk withdrew from OpenAI, claiming at the time that the reason was to avoid any conflict of interest with Tesla, because Tesla was developing its own artificial intelligence technology for the autopilot system, which would compete with OpenAI for talent. However, there are also reports that the real reason for Musk's departure may be the failure of internal power grabs. **The specific reason is unknown to the outside world. **

In March 2019, Sam resigned from Y Combinator and began to devote himself to the development of OpenAI. In May 2019, under Sam's leadership, OpenAI transformed from a non-profit business to a for-profit company.

**Following that, Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019. In January 2023, Microsoft announced again that it would invest billions of dollars in OpenAI. **

While no specifics were released, Microsoft's investment is thought to be in the $10 billion range. Moreover, ChatGPT is also integrated into the Bing search engine.

So far, during Sam's tenure as CEO, OpenAI has released to the public generative AI tools DALL-E and ChatGPT, both of which are tools for robots to create their own artwork and text based on input information, where DALL -E Released on January 5, 2021.

What really made OpenAI popular was the release of ChatGPT. Within 5 days after the release of ChatGPT, there were more than 1 million players, a milestone that took Facebook 10 months to reach.

**At the same time, when Sam left YC in 2019 to devote himself to the development of artificial intelligence, because he came into contact with a large number of top encryption projects in YC, he realized that the development of human beings in the future requires the exchange of global digital identities, so The idea of Worldcoin was born. **So in 2020, Sam recruited two people, Max and Alex Blania, to create the Worldcoin project together.

例句：It was 2019, when Sam left the famous incubator Y Combinatol to become the CEO of OpenAl, he started interviewing various talents to develop the new organization he had always envisioned. His first co-founder, Max Novendstern, was a former investment associate at Bridgewater Associates, who had previously worked at a remittance startup called Wave; his second co-founder, Alex Blania, had been at Caltech and Max Plane Ke learned to study theoretical physics.

Worldcoin's goals are ambitious. The project aims to use eye scanning technology (Orb), also known as iris scanning technology, as a global identification mechanism to lower the barriers to entry and enable people around the world to easily access encrypted assets.

Its vision is to build the world's largest and fair digital identity and digital asset system, and practice the "universal basic income" social experiment, that is, in the economic system in the future era of artificial intelligence, people do not need to work, but only need a World App. Get money with a click and meet basic needs to achieve "billions of people out of poverty".

According to official information, Worldcoin mainly disassembles its goal into three parts: **Create a global identity ID, a global asset, and a wallet that carries the identity ID and assets. These three tasks correspond to three elements: DID, Token and wallet, **specifically:

• WorldID: Orb scans the iris to establish a personal identity, a digital identity based on privacy protection and personality proof
• WorldCoin: A total of 10 billion Tokens have been issued, becoming the first Token distributed to people for free around the world. It is planned to be distributed to 1 billion people and built on the OP super chain
• WorldAPP: a wallet for payment, purchase and transfer around the world, realizing people's UBI (Universal Basic Income: Universal Basic Income)

Stuck in a development bottleneck

Although Worldcoin has been in the spotlight with the aura of ChatGPT and received huge financing since its release, the reality is that the ambitious Worldcoin has encountered many doubts and resistance:

**1. The first is slow progress. **

At the end of 2021, Worldcoin announced that it would launch the main network in 2022, and planned to cover 1 billion users by 2023. However, it did not perform as scheduled. The number of Worldcoin users just exceeded 1 million between 2021 and 2022. During this period, it also encountered public opinion whirlpools such as privacy dilemmas and paid promotions, and even faced a shutdown situation for a time.

Today, Worldcoin's mainnet launch plan has been postponed to the first half of 2023. Although the official version of WorldAPP was launched on May 8 this year, the Worldcoin App including the test version has covered about 2 million users, but this data is still far from the goal.

**2. Secondly, it was accused of privacy issues, and was even questioned as exploiting the poor. **

On the one hand, by scanning the iris of everyone's eyeballs, collecting biometric information to achieve identity verification, allowing Worldcoin to walk on the edge of laws related to personal information protection, and whoever scans their own eyeballs against this instrument will have The promise of qualifying for Worldcoin Token has not been fulfilled so far.

It is also not clear about what value Worldcoin Token circulation can generate for recipients and how to generate value. Is it by distributing income from AI? Or by providing some sort of service to a third party?

Iris biometric device Orb

**On the other hand, because Worldcoin's core business model is to achieve universal basic income by collecting data, it has been questioned to offset the unemployment loss caused by artificial intelligence. **

However, according to official data, Worldcoin is currently registered in most of the less developed countries, such as Africa and Latin America. Currently, there are 24 countries and regions participating in the test, 14 of which are developing countries, 8 3 countries are located in developing countries such as Cambodia and Kenya in Africa, and the collection process may have deceptive marketing methods, such as failing to obtain meaningful informed consent, collecting more personal data than it admits, etc.

Although according to the official statement, the data scanned by Orb will not be stored and maliciously used by Worldcoin, and ZK technology will be gradually adopted for higher security protection. But in fact, in some areas, its operating contractors will adopt incentive measures to encourage local residents to submit data, and even data trading has occurred. The phenomenon of irises of unsuspecting villagers being bought for $30 or less to help complete app registrations. **

Solving the digital identity problem by putting the biometric information of people in developing countries at enormous risk is a worthwhile trade-off. Therefore, some people say that this is the exploitation of the poor.

**3. Finally, how to break through the current contradictions in international supervision and data processing. **

According to the EU GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), any data that operates in the EU or involves EU residents is subject to EU supervision, and failure to adequately protect data will result in fines. As for Worldcoin, which is determined to become the first encryption project for global users, it is known that Worldcoin's global operation conflicts with EU regulations to a certain extent, and how to deal with global data has not been fully clarified.

**In addition to the above problems, there are also some unfavorable voices in the industry. **

According to the news in May, Hudson Jameson, a former developer of the Ethereum Foundation, tweeted that the WorldCoin project plan is "impractical and terrible." The problem, the economic distribution of Worldcoin Token, and how to create a fair global asset, **Have they analyzed how to prevent the gap between the rich and the poor in some areas. WorldCoin seems to be a product invented by VC to solve global problems, but apart from developing Cool tech, they don't know anything about the factors that solve the problem. I don't think WorldCoin will be successful."

Hudson is far from the only one questioning the future of Worldcoin, with Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko also expressing his doubts, saying that "cheap + open access FaceID" could make Worldcoin "obsolete."

**However, the lead investor Blockchain Capital believes that Worldcoin may become the largest entrance to encrypted assets, and World App may become the most widely used encrypted wallet. **

Blockchain Capital shareholder Spencer Bogart pointed out on Twitter that Worldcoin is a widely misunderstood project and that World ID has a "unique opportunity to build and expand new privacy protections that allow any application to distinguish between humans and robots. Improve the user experience of the internet, unlock countless new features and applications, and help restore trust in digital communities (consciously talking to real people, not armies of robots)".

However, the specific development of Worldcoin and whether it can break through the dual difficulties of morality and economics are still to be determined.

Big ideas about the future

From a publicity perspective, Worldcoin does not seem to be that important to Sam. He neither serves as Worldcoin CEO nor directly mentions the project on his twitter and blog.

But in his blog, Sam is very concerned about world order, wealth distribution, and governance. But at present, everyone still has reservations about the distribution of Worldcoin Token and the ideal of "universal basic income". Therefore, if you want to realize a rich world through Worldcoin, the future is still not clear enough.

**In addition, in understanding the direction of future technological innovation, Sam Altman is not just betting on AI and encryption. **Sam's blog puts forward the most technical innovation direction is energy. In 2014, Sam Altman also listed Y Combinator's optimistic technology fields in his blog, among which energy ranked first, followed by AI, biotechnology and other directions.

So after officially joining Open AI, Sam also invested in some energy and biotechnology companies. In 2021, Sam led a $375 million Series E round in fusion company Helion, the largest investment Sam Altman has made to date. In March 2023, Sam Altman invested another US$180 million in ReviBio, a company that focuses on anti-aging and extending human life.

**Some people understand Sam's investment as a four-part series about the future: that is, OpenAI will acquire most of the world's wealth by creating AGI (General Artificial Intelligence), and then redistribute this wealth to people, and solve the human limit through Helion and ReviBio problems, while Worldcoin is to solve the problems of human identification and resource allocation in the future world. **

However, although ChatGPT is currently out of the circle, it is opposed by those who are worried about AI. The future direction of Worldcoin is still uncertain.

Whether Worldcoin can break through the siege, and whether Sam's grand ideal can be realized, we will wait and see.