Sam Altman’s eyeball scanning project has a new Orb and a new name

Worldcoin, a cryptocurrency / personal identity network / UBI project co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, is now known as World. Along with the name change, World unveiled an updated version of its Orb eyeball scanning device designed to solve a problem that doesn’t exist right now: proving someone is human in the “AI age.”

People who sign up for the program get a World ID that they can use to “securely and anonymously authenticate” themselves online, along with a share of the associated WLD cryptocurrency token.

The new Orb is made with 30 percent fewer parts than its predecessor, which should make it easier and cheaper to build, and is equipped with Nvidia’s robotics and AI platform, Jetson, for some reason. Rich Heley, chief executive of Tools for Humanity – the foundation of the global project – said during the event on Thursday that the simplified design should help achieve the goal of making the Orb more widely available.

“To give access to everyone, we need more Orbs. More Orbs to live in. Maybe on the order of a thousand times more Orbs than we have today,” Heley said. “Not just more Orbs but more Orbs.” More Orbs in more places.” In addition to accumulating Orb production, the World will even allow people to buy or hire their own eyeball scanning facility to “start validating unique people” in their communities.

It’s also launching a new service called “Orb on Demand” (yes, it’s really called that) that will allow people to order Orbs “like pizza delivered to your house,” Heley said. Orb is coming to many countries, including Costa Rica, Brazil, Indonesia, Australia, United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and more.

World says it has verified nearly 7 million “unique people” so far, despite privacy concerns about the creation of a secret global database based on biometrics.