Virtual Fireside Chat: Sam Altman

Transcript

good morning all right let's try that again good morning [Music] hello hello Sam thank you for joining us can you hear us thanks for having me say hello yes hello awesome awesome it's delighted to have you join us today where are you right now Sam I'm in DC I'm sorry I can't be there in person you're in DC and what sorry oh I'm sorry I can't be there in person but I have to be in DC today we hope you could join us next time in Singapore or Dubai Alex it's great to have you here why don't we first have Alex share a bit about worldcoin let's keep it under two

minutes because we have so many things to talk about and why don't you kick it off sure I will keep it short because I think most of the things we'll also cover in a conversation but uh can you speak up a little bit okay I will keep it short because I think the most of it will cover the conversation but uh World coin is fundamentally two things it is a way to prove personhood uh for the whole world billions of people with a physical device we call the orb uh that you probably have seen somewhere here it's kind of a mirror ball and uh once you verified you receive ownership in a digital currency called raw coin that hopefully will be the virus distributed digital currency in the world and why we think this matters is we think that proof of

personal internet is going to be a major topic but also because that lays the groundwork for qbi and those two things together prove a personal end roll coin will hopefully scale the network really really quickly to many people thank you for that I know you many hats so I have to ask have you successfully created AI versions of yourself to do all these tasks oh yeah not yet okay and Alex you guys have been traveling all over the world worldcoin has been in so many

cities and also in Singapore now what's your strategy here where are you guys thinking about so when we we launched two months ago as probably many of you have seen um and we try to be in many new markets that we have not been before so we put orbs in also Asia we've been in Singapore we've been in Hong Kong Tokyo and just try to be available in as many markets as we possibly can and what we learned doing that is that Asia is is like a huge Market there's like so many people here excited about crypto so many people excited about worldcoin uh so that's part of why we're

here today and we will push much more in Singapore specifically also um other than that I mean we're really all over the world we we're in in Europe Portugal Spain Germany uh in India in Africa so it's like it was a lot of travel and it's super busy time can you share some stats since launch sure we had uh we had a crazy crazy search in uh in the weeks after launch so we have been at 2.1 million users I think before launch uh we are now 2.3 but the craziest thing for us was that there were like long long lines of people

waiting to sign up pretty much everywhere um and that was really hard to manage so what we are trying to do right now a lot is just ramping back up and getting much more herbs out there talking to a lot of policy makers and just scaling so we are now at 40 000 standards a week something like that but we could do theoretically much much more by just pushing more more of so for sure for sure and Sam when you first created World coin I love to hear the story of how the mission has evolved right we've seen the onset of chat GPT 3.5 becoming mainstream adoption and how

has that mission changed if any since the beginning of World coin the mission actually hasn't changed very much I think Church PC has made it clearer to more people but the idea that we need to think about proof of personhood and think about new ways to do sort of Global governance or global economic systems that that hasn't changed in our mind and importance I think it's just maybe clear to the rest of the world gotcha and when we're looking at the kind of increasing adoption of chat GPT 3.5 should we think about you know the adoption curve for World coin to correlate

I think they're pretty disconnected at this point but I think the adoption for World coin will hopefully follow similar shape gotcha thank you and Alex our crypto industry has historically been horrible at building really good experiences and good ux for users and we also have had a quite a number of hurdles with the regular Regulators right what have your learnings been like in the last three to six months in those areas since launching World coin so I mean uh regulators and then kind of talking to Regulators talking to policy makers is a big part of what I do

kind of these days especially after launch and I mean very clearly the industry has had a hard time especially last year so there's a lot of questions there's a lot of questions like why uh what why crypto why crypto here how does it work there's a lot of countries that I travel to that really just try to figure out the general regulation kind of General regulatory framework around crypto I mean all of us are aware of the United States but that similar situations are uh are happening around the world where you have a parliaments and and ministers debating how to regulate crypto as a whole and so honestly a lot of what I do when I talk to people is just talking about that

because they really are still figuring out the the fundamentals and then the general regulatory framework but I think it's going to progress and it will have to progress relatively quickly I think Road coin to some degree accelerated that in some countries we we learned over the last two or three weeks um but yeah of course we will continue to help and always try to talk to as many people as possible and then to your other question about use cases of crypto and like General use experiences I think the major the major problem that we all face is that most of the products we build are

not yet mainstream or actually very few of them are and so but I think it's going to change there's a lot of exciting things now happening so what have you learned just from you know the conversations of when you're bringing the orb to a person right they're asking hey what is this thing to how do I actually enable my information protected and my privacy protected when I'm scanning my orb right these are all very difficult and kind of educational things that you need to start introducing to the users yeah it really depends on where you talk to users

um kind of the bias is very different I think Asia is actually uh very surprising to me because you you don't start explaining what what crypto is which is usually actually what you what do you face even in any European markets much more than you would expect it's like what is a uh you you really can make Technologies to other crypto projects or protocols but here of course the very different I think crypto adoption here is very very strong and so when I picked roll coin of course I talk about all the things about enable but to your specific question about data is that your data is deleted we don't

have any data view the protocol doesn't have any data View but more importantly whenever you start using Road ID and everything connected to it it is separated with see knowledge proofs from your financial wallet and your actions so this means that you actually stay completely anonymous which is a very very powerful thing given I do believe that we have to figure this out globally some kind of verification mechanism on the internet and I think world ID is a chance to do that in a really truly privacy preserving way that also works independent of governments can solving the problem just to show overhands how many of you have actually scanned your eyes here today at the orb

uh in the conference it's like 10 10 percent yeah how many of you are interested in doing so okay we have a good number of hands showing up that's great Alex I'm especially also curious about how you guys are thinking about go to market right when it comes to approaching Regulators we talk about that a little bit but how are you thinking about really taking this to the ground of different cities and what has that adoption been like it's very different really in different

markets yeah so the the general Playbook is always we started with universities mostly because that's where you find University you said yeah interesting because that's where you find like super tech savvy people yep and so usually someone of our team of travel University uh with an orb start pitching Rel coin and then pick whoever is seems very talented or entrepreneurial to actually take an orb and take it from their at University campus then we try to find local partners um and and roll it out from there so that but but again it's very local it's very different it's very different for African markets than it is for European markets or Asian markets

but generally I think what is interesting and different about Brooklyn is that we already try to be everywhere all at once so it's not focused on only let him or only Europe but it we really try to be balanced globally so that makes it really really challenging very hard because there's a lot of different cultures a lot of different backgrounds yeah Sam I think you were also recently in Asia visiting Korea and Japan with worldcoin can you share your little bit of uh your observations of the markets here and we'd love to hear more about that the excitement level was super high I was very impressed with all the people

I'd talk to I think that technological maturity in general throughout Asia particularly in South Korea and Japan but a lot of other places makes it exciting for crypto and Ai and a lot of other sort of Frontier Technologies for sure and and when you're looking and you yourself has been an opportunity entrepreneur for quite some time right and you have seen so many companies being taken from zero to one and Beyond what have you seen and is needed for crypto to reach main adoption what are you thinking there when it comes to the next stage for crypto well certainly I think worldwide is one

answer to that um but more more generally I think people need to make it easier to use uh better sort of more important use cases and um just a clear value proposition overall but I think a lot of that work is happening a lot of the a lot of that work is happening yep gotcha and Alex I know one of the largest criticisms for our industry has been there's no real utility for crypto right can you share us share with us some real world use cases that you imagine World coin or any other type of

um projects that you see can really push the industry forward sure well I mean for worldcoin I think hopefully in the next year or so we will start seeing major Integrations so you can actually start verifying yourself online um with your world Eddie maybe actually one of the one of the bigger social media companies or something like that like none of this is actually figured out but I think that's that's at least what we're aiming at or try to make happen I think one of the major things that is now happening in crypto is actually stablecoin transfers that's actually a real world use case I mean the Visa announcement last week I think was pretty big yes

honestly I think that's like pretty much the only real like large-scale example that we have right now as an industry uh but but yeah for real coin it will be initially very much focused on Roll Daddy for the next year or so uh and then at some point it will emerge much more around the fact that the network itself is so large that developers can build on top of it um so it really is right now all about growing and reaching as many people as we can I think the mic is going on and off yeah what do you think I have a lot of confidence and hope that worldcoin can really bring a lot of

adoption to crypto especially in the good kind we're seeing around 3 million or 2.3 million users already being brought in via the orb it's very promising numbers that I'm seeing initially but this this mic is going in and out so I'd love to get to get fixed very soon but I think you know one of the other questions that we're looking at and we're facing as an industry is that how do we start gradually decentralizing right once you reach a certain milestone people will start asking you about decentralization how are you thinking about decentralization on the team front or and on the project front yep um I mean it really is one of the major

Focus areas it's actually what Sam asked me I think once a week at this point uh is decentralization and kind of the progress we can make about it in our case it is of course trickier than it is the case usually because you have Hardware that needs to be produced by other people it needs to be somewhat commissioned so there's a lot of new challenges here that I think other crypto projects would not face but uh we will figure it out and I think that's really internally with an engineering team one of the major Focus areas so I think within the next two years we will be in a place where you you can really

say it's meaningfully decentralized and then of course within the next five to ten years fully fully decentralized and we are not having any control anymore of it Sam do you have anything to thoughts on decentralization and for Oregon I'm having a little bit of a hard time hearing you but from what I think I heard I I agree that desensitivization for World coin is really important that I ask Alex about it very frequently and I think it'll be a great milestone for the company to go to yeah Alex has mentioned that you guys talk about world coin on a weekly basis how has your role evolved with World coin I think you made a face there I'm

curious to hear what what's what what are your thoughts there right now no I was just saying I mean Alex does an incredible job running the company yeah and I try to be available for whatever help he needs but uh I mean the Alex and the team are just doing incredible work yeah yeah I mean from building a orb from scratch um maybe talk a little bit about that because I think that's super interesting and just even worthwhile for folks to just look at and take a look when they're here in the booth talk about how we build your how you built the orb from scratch I mean it really is completely from scratch so we had to build everything down to the lens really uh from ground

up we actually we started the company pretty much in the middle of covid and so we had this crazy situation where we were sitting in a small town in erlangen in Germany which is like a small town and uh with the hardware team and build everything from scratch and every Saturday we would go out and test the hardware uh in in the city with users well at least if there was no complete lockdown but that given we kind of every Saturday took out a new prototype talked to users so what the reaction is and how it's going um and then iterate it again and again and uh then two years ago kicked off the first

manufacturing effort really which was he had a completed new story taking a prototype and Manufacturing it at scale and now internally we actually have much more sophisticated devices already than the ones that you see here so there's gonna come a lot of progress in the coming years should we expect the orb to have a second version third version coming out oh for sure yeah many you should expect a new version every two years I think with better security better Imaging uh all of these things one of the questions I want to come back to is privacy it's a very common topic

brought up by everyone who either understands worldcoin or who don't understand coracoin because this is what they care about the most maybe let's talk about that and again um how are the users data being protected and when you're working with Enterprise customers and partners how is that managed there so it actually is pretty simple is when you when you want to verify when you sign up the orb first checks that you're an actual human beings so there's a thermal camera and other cameras in front of of the orb that actually check with a couple neural networks on the device that you're an actual human being versus a display or a more complicated attack to

the device once that passes uh a picture of the eye is taken and why the I because the eye actually has enough information to uh unique uniquely verify billions of people which face or fingerprint all these other modalities would not have um and then a unique code is calculated out of that picture signed by the orb and that is then the only thing that actually leaves the orb so the data is deleted but then much more importantly that code is inserted and is like write notes a database at some point it will be a blockchain of course but it's inserted in a database checked against all other

users and lived at uniqueness check works you as a user then can verify VSC or knowledge proof that you're included into that set but what that means is that neither us nor the service you log into knows who you actually are so essentially you stay completely decoupled from your actual uniqueness code and then of course no data stored so the data is deleted upon really once you register the orb and have received a world ID yes I love to switch a question to Sam you've been pretty quiet there I'm happy to talk

talk about your vision of kind of world coin and chat DBT and world and open AI my mic is also going in and off I apologize talk about your vision how you imagine World ID and World coin coexisting with kind of the new world of AI right that I'm calling it now yeah look I think none of us quite know what the world is going to be like in changing all of these extremely profound ways we're seeing just that that barely tip of the iceberg of that one with chastity as these systems become more powerful and become part of our lives in society and all these new ways uh we think that a lot of the things worldcoin is working

on are going to be important in that world but we'll see as we go and we'll evolve at the very tight feedback loop what do you expect to be the largest hurdles for worldcoin given your experience kind of going through with open AI well I think getting any new thing to work it's just really hard it's amazing how much money is already done like the the scale of the network is already quite impressive but there's obviously a mountain of challenges still in front of the project um it's hard to sort of pick one and say this is the hardest one like it's a lot of things that all have to come together but it's like an incredible team an incredible progress out of the gate maybe just name two challenges that

you're seeing facing um two challenges for welcome people but we're all going in the next 16 months uh well the operational challenge is obviously huge if you think about what it takes to just get these orbs manufactured and explain to people in center around the world operators and all that and the other is of course just the sort of like overcoming the kind of like Biometrics resistance for like a better word that people feel when they some people feel when they first hear about the project but again both of those I think went well both of them sorry trending well like the company's making good progress understood and using Industries

kind of thrive and also companies die right what advice do you have for industry like ours right we have written through multiple bearing bull cycles um what advice do you have you know humbling our industry here directly but what advice do you have for our industry you know for folks who's been building in this bear market and what should we continue to look forward to and um just any kind of tips for us uh um conviction and focus I think that's always this underrated special combination and then focus on the user can you give us an example of what

you're seeing in terms of conviction and focus in crypto if you see any in terms of successes that work a week model after well worldcoin is the project that I know best by far by far and that is a team of incredible conviction in what they're doing and focus on what happens to get there so World point is is for sure the example of it below yep yep um another example I definitely could think of is coinbase right they have really built along with our industry and with it reaches and launched a base we've seen a lot of Attraction and volume um on projects like friendtech so um I think last question for Alex what do you wish the public to know more about worldcoin that have not yet been

discussed much honestly I think it's mostly around just understanding the fundamentals of it that it is not we don't have your data it is privacy preserving all of these like standard things just get get them home and get people to understand it I think that's that's really most of what we face right now there's nothing super like tricky that I would like people to understand yeah I definitely encourage everyone to go check out the booth uh downstairs and get your eyes scanned and give it a try because it's definitely shaping the future of what are I think crypto technology is but

World also verification identification so thank you so much Sam for joining us maybe any last parting words for our audience no I think I think we see you in Singapore again uh hopefully pretty soon actually apparently working on a trip okay okay we'll look forward to it thank you everyone for joining us let's give it a round of applause for our audience I guess good go