What's inside the sphere? The untold story behind Worldcoin

Source: Coindesk; Compilation: BitpushNews Mary Liu

I headed to Berlin to look to the future. Or, more precisely, I traveled to Berlin to see “the ball” – literally – a device that some believe is humanity’s best hope for taming and even harnessing the future power of artificial intelligence. Others believe that, similar to the Black Mirror episodes, the device is designed to track and control humans.

I'm staring at this sphere "Orb".

The Orb is about the size of a bowling ball. It is alloy plated, shiny and smooth. I leaned in and stared at a black circle like you would stare at a machine at an optometrist. Orb then uses infrared cameras, sensors, and an AI-powered neural network system to scan my irises and verify that I'm indeed a human.

I'm not the first to eat crabs. More than 2 million people have now seen the flagship device of Orb – Worldcoin, the crypto and AI project co-founded by Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI) and Alex Blania (now CEO of parent company Tools for Humanity).

Worldcoin has a bold premise: that artificial intelligence will continue to improve and eventually evolve into AGI (Advanced General Intelligence), meaning it is smarter than humans, which will spur leaps in productivity, creating wealth that should not be taken away by elites, but should be distributed fairly to all of humanity — virtually everyone — in the form of a Universal Basic Income (UBI), which will empower billions of people. UBI will appear in the form of Worldcoin.

The virtues of UBI have resonated with Altman for years. Altman said in a recent Zoom interview: "UBI is interesting to me even without talking about artificial intelligence, and the idea appeals to a lot of people. If our society is rich enough to end poverty, then we have a moral obligation to figure out how to do it."

So, maybe AI can succeed where political policy has failed?

“In the world of AI, it [universal basic income] is even more important for obvious reasons, and I still expect there will be jobs in the post-AI world,” Altman said. “But, A, I do think we need some kind of buffer in the transition, and, B, part of the excitement about AI is that it’s a more materialistic world.”

A worldcoin that follows this logic could be the key to providing this material abundance. But there is a problem. If the goal is to distribute tokens to everyone for free, how can we be sure in this AI-driven future that we distribute the loot to humans, not AI-driven dummies? (It's only a matter of time before AI laughs at captchas.) Or what if someone with ulterior motives uses AI to create multiple wallets and cheat the system?

The team pondered this question as well, they explored all the ways how to prove they were human, and then came to a painful conclusion - they had no choice. “We really don’t want to do it, we know it’s going to be painful, it’s expensive, and people think it’s weird. But we think it has to be done: biometric data is needed to authenticate humans,” Blania said. "We don't want to go down this route for a number of reasons, but it's really the only solution," Blania said.

This is the untold story of that solution, and a journey to discover whether it is a solution or a problem.

Iris Sphere

The Sphere's design is sleek and minimal, with no controls or knobs in a very "Apple" style. This is no coincidence, as the Orb's lead designer was Thomas Meyerhoffer, Jony Ive's first employee at Apple. (I've been the legendary designer of the iMac, iPod and iPhone.) Orb aims to be as simple as possible, Meyerhoffer once said: "It has to be simple enough for all of us. Everyone, everywhere".

In the Berlin office, Blania showed me old models of the Orb and told me stories about the company's early days, when they were first tinkering with hardware. The idea was originally conceived as "The Bitcoin Project," with the goal of distributing bitcoins to people for free once they had proven their humanity. Blania holds up the old version and laughs as it has a slot for spitting out physical tokens, like a reverse piggy bank, and even has two eyeballs and a mouth.

Early spheres even spoke to people. “This thing talks to you with a robotic voice,” recalls Blania. Each early Orbs could hold 15 physical tokens (which contained the keys to actual bitcoins), the idea being that people would take cryptocurrencies more seriously if they held something in their hands. (The team quickly dropped the idea, for obvious reasons.) "We tried a lot of things, like vibrating when the sphere told people something," says Blania. They quickly iterate using the 3D printer to come up with new versions of the Orb every week.

Blania, a tall, athletic, baby-faced 29-year-old in jeans and a T-shirt, doesn't look like a CEO. He leads one of the most ambitious projects on the planet and his first job. Altman named him CEO and co-founder after working at Caltech, where he researched neural networks and theoretical physics. At first, Blania admits, "I thought I was a terrible CEO, in addition to my technical depth."

So Altman helped him. “Altman would have someone meet with me basically every week, and they would tell me what wasn’t doing well,” he says. “One of the CEO coaches was Matt Mochary, who had previously taught Altman and Brian Armstrong, and he taught them the basics of management, like how to have one-on-ones, how to run staff meetings, how to do public speaking.

Blania has no hobbies, except weightlifting and meditation. His hours are split between San Francisco and Berlin (Tools for Humanity's two main offices), where he starts his day at 9am and leaves the office at 10pm to head to the gym. "I try to work every waking hour," he said.

The job included leading 50 full-time employees, some of whom were tasked with creating a new crypto wallet from O. “The user experience in cryptocurrencies is terrible,” said Tiago Sada, head of product and engineering, whom I also met in the Berlin office, another genius. (There are plenty of them in the AI community.) He grew up in Mexico, built robots with friends at age 14, went on to start the “Venmo of Mexico” startup, and met Altman at the Y Combinator incubator.

Sada was initially skeptical of encryption because, in his view, it would be difficult for non-technical people to easily sign up. When he asked people to do things like download the MetaMask extension, they got stuck. Sure, crypto wallets are available for those interested in crypto, but for many of the 8 billion people on the planet, they have a barrier to entry. The core idea of Worldcoin is to make cryptocurrency easily accessible to everyone, whether they are tech-savvy or not. That is, they can accomplish something in the blink of an eye. So they built WorldApp, which syncs with the Orb and allows near-instant login.

I tried it myself. In the Berlin office, I downloaded the World App from the App Store. The app syncs with The Orb, which sits on a conference room table. A few seconds later, I'm gazing at the shiny orb, my account is verified and I'm now the proud owner of 1 Worldcoin*. (*Which would not be possible if I tried it in the US, where they don't have a token launch for regulatory reasons - at least not yet.)

The registration process, at least for me, was pretty smooth. If you ignore the whole eyeball-scanning process, it's easily the smoothest entry into encryption I've experienced in over five years. (More on that later.)

One of the reasons the technology works so well is the embrace of AI, whose paradoxes are pervasive, where AI’s potential consequences—both fantastic (productivity gains) and malicious (deepfakes)—promote a company’s mission, but on a more day-to-day basis, recent advances in AI make engineers more efficient. Sada said: "Without artificial intelligence, Worldcoin cannot exist". Multiple machine-learning models help power the Orb, and Sada says the AI is already (in effect) training other AIs, further increasing their productivity.

** How does artificial intelligence train artificial intelligence? **

“People think we need a lot of data to train algorithms, and in fact, many models allow us to generate synthetic data,” Sada said. “Just as you can use a Dall-E to create an image of Luke Skywalker dunking a Caravaggio-style dunk — and it comes back in seconds — engineers can use AI to create data simulations. This allows us to use relatively little data and remove everyone’s [biometric and iris] data by default.”

This brings us to a question that has plagued Worldcoin since its inception: What exactly is Worldcoin doing with these eyeball scans?

After Altman tweeted The Orb in October 2021, critics and skeptics slammed it. Edward Snowden warned in a tweet: "Don't classify eyeballs, don't use biometrics to counter fraud. In fact, don't use biometrics for anything."

Snowden acknowledged that the project uses ZK-Proofs to protect privacy, but insisted that "smart is smart, but still sucks, the human body is not a ticket gate."

David Z. Morris writes: "For a private company to collect biometric data on every person on Earth is hugely risky, by the way, calling the device the Orb – creepy with thick Eye of Sauron hints".

Blania, Sada, and others at Worldcoin have repeatedly stated to me that the Orb does not collect biometric data from eyeballs, or at least not unless the user explicitly allows it.

"Privacy is a fundamental human right. Every part of the Worldcoin system has been designed to defend it uncompromisingly. We don't want to know who you are, we just want to know that you are unique," reads the company's privacy statement, meaning that some data is captured if users allow it. The default is to not capture data; users can change this and allow data to be stored, which Worldcoin says is used for the narrow purpose of improving its algorithm. (And why a user would enable this is beyond me).

SADA said: "The coolest thing is also the most difficult thing. It is ORB who handle all computing and verification locally to review whether you are a unique human, and then it generates a unique" iris code ". SADA said that you can treat your world ID as a passport, and what ORB does is stamped on your passport to indicate that it is effective. There is no eyeball map. It is just a code, indicating that you are a unique person, not your age, race, gender, or eye color.

On the day of Worldcoin’s public launch, Vitalik Buterin wrote a detailed blog post questioning its privacy statement. He raised concerns, but gave a good rating. He said: "In general, despite the 'dystopian vibe' of staring at a sphere and having it scan deeply into your eyeballs, specialized hardware systems do seem to do a fairly good job of preserving privacy... However, the flip side of this is that specialized hardware systems introduce a larger centralization problem. So we think cypherpunks seem to be stuck: we have to trade off one deeply rooted cypherpunk value against another."

Once a user has a WorldID (which Worldcoin insists is privacy-preserving), it can be used in the future as a master key to access other apps and websites such as Twitter or ChatGPT. They have already started experimenting with this feature. WorldID recently announced an integration with German identity and access management provider Okta, with more partnerships on the way.

WorldID is a form of self-sovereign identity, itself the holy grail for many in the Web3 space. In an optimistic and best-case scenario, Orb could scale SSID and UBI to billions of people, wrest online "identity" from centralized corporate giants, and help poorer, marginalized communities gain more financial empowerment. This is the vision.

But who pays for it? According to the way the system is currently configured, once you register Orb, you can claim 1 Worldcoin per week. This is the early core of UBI. Who is paying for this token that suddenly appears in every wallet (or eyeball) on the planet? On the one hand, cryptocurrencies do have precedent, it enters the world like magic, and then eventually increases in value, Bitcoin is the best example, then again, part of Bitcoin's value proposition is its scarcity, and its supply is capped at 21 million coins.

Token Economics

The token economics of Worldcoin are more murky.

Jesse Walden, an early investor in the project and general partner at iant, admitted that "who pays" is a good question, but he said, "I don't know if there is a clear answer now, and I don't know if there needs to be." In his view, most startups don't come up with a business model at the beginning.

Altman has a more pragmatic answer. In the short term, Altman said, “Our hope is that when people want to buy this token because they believe this is the future, there will be money flowing into the economy. New token buyers are how it effectively gets paid.”

Of course, the longer-term and grander vision is that the results of general artificial intelligence will bring economic returns to mankind. (Hence the name of Worldcoin’s parent company—Tools for Humanity.) How this happens is anyone’s guess. "Ultimately, you can imagine all sorts of things in a post-AGI world, but we have no specific plans for that. At this stage, that's not the point," Altman said.

Few people are better equipped to envision a post-AI world than Altman, who stands at the strange intersection between these two AI projects. A central player in the development of artificial intelligence, Altman is a co-founder of the project, which aims in part to curb the abuse of artificial intelligence as much as possible. Though he doesn't think so: "I find it more appealing to describe the story as 'create problems here, fix problems there'".

This is the pattern of development in Altman's eyes: the world will move on. As the world continues to move forward, so does the playing field. There's a lot more that should happen, but this doesn't feel like a solution to the problem. It's more like a co-evolving ecosystem. I don't think one is a response to the other. " (I admit that Altman crushed me intellectually, he gave me the impression of sincerity and kindness, but I did find his answers difficult to understand)

I asked Altman the same question I posed to Blania in my first talk: what would the world be like if Worldcoin was fully successful and everything worked? Assuming that billions of users have joined, the financial benefits of AGI are distributed fairly to all. What does that future look like? What is the point of all this?

“I think we’re all going to be the best version of what we can hope for, more personal autonomy and agency. More time, more resources to do things,” Altman says. He speaks quickly, without hesitation; these are ideas he’s been pondering for years: “Like any technological revolution, people will find amazing new things for each other … but it’s a very different, more exciting world.”

What are the biggest risks and challenges in realizing this vision? Altman believes that “it’s too early to talk about big challenges,” but he admits that OpenAI and Worldcoin are “a long way from being useful” and that “we still have a lot of work ahead of us.”

The heavy lifting includes rolling out the Orb, and this is where things get dangerous.

Application scenario

The goal of scanning eight billion sets of eyeballs is almost ambitious. In the long run, delivering a free handful of "candy" to everyone on the planet, even without any biometric strings attached, is a daunting logistical challenge. How to reach remote areas? How to transport the sphere safely? How to explain this complex relationship between the potential of AGI, the need for UBI, and the merits of encryption?

The pitch is essentially, hey, get some free crypto!

The message has been refined, tinkered, and nuanced over time, but here's the basic pitch: users can sign up for some free cryptocurrency, and this Orb is your way of proving you haven't signed up anywhere before.

Think back to Blania's first field test like something out of a Judd Apatow comedy. In a park in Germany, Blania was looking for possible users with orbs when he noticed two young women. Should he go up and talk? The Worldcoin team watches from a distance. (In the Berlin office, Blania finds a photo of someone taking the scene on her phone and shows it to me: like a guy in a bar, working up the nerve to strike up a conversation.)

At that time, they were still in the early "bitcoin project" era. So Blania approached one of the women, who showed her the Orb and said it would help her get free bitcoins. “The only thing this device does is make sure you only get it [bitcoin] once, but you get bitcoin and that’s something to be happy about,” he told her.

The woman's response was simple: "Are you crazy?"

She chooses not to have her iris scanned, but her friend does.

Blania half-smiles: "Actually, I think she just thinks I'm cute."

This is not surprising. Blania is a handsome guy, smart, and able to speak clearly and convincingly about the benefits, nuances, and raison d'être of Worldcoins (who wouldn't be impressed?). But how do you scale Alex Blania? Maybe if Blania could be cloned, he could personally sign up 8 billion people.

But back to reality, at first, Blania and a small team were just dragging the sphere around the streets of Berlin, showing it to people and trying to explain it on the fly. "It was actually an early script where people would come up to us because it was this shiny sphere and people would ask, 'What the hell is that?'" he said.

Early spheres spoke to users in strange robotic voices, instructing them to move closer or farther away, or perhaps to the left. (The team later made a series of optimizations to automate the process.) The robotic voice confuses onlookers, who sometimes take hilarious selfies with the Orb.

Neo-Colonial Issues

Less interesting are the early attempts to recruit users in Nairobi, Sudan and Indonesia. In April 2022, MIT Technology Reports published a 7,000-word feature article titled "Deceit, Worker Exploitation, and Cash Handouts: How Worldcoin Recruited Its First 500,000 Test Users." The authors argue that, despite the project's ambitions, "all it has done so far is create a biometric database based on poor people's bodies."

The report described a shoddy operation riddled with misinformation, data errors and malfunctioning orbs. Eileen Guo and Adi Renaldi wrote: "Our investigation revealed a huge gap between Worldcoin's privacy-focused public information and user experience, and we found that the company's representatives used deceptive marketing methods, collected more personal data than it admitted, and failed to obtain meaningful rights to know."

I mentioned this report to Blania and Altman. “The first thing to understand is that this article was published before the company raised its Series A round,” Blania said. He acknowledged that was no excuse, but stressed that the project was still in its infancy and since then "virtually everything has changed" with stricter operations and protocols. Of course, it's the possibility of mistakes like this -- no matter how well-intentioned the team may be -- that makes people uneasy about sharing their biometric data.

Blania was also outraged that the article was defined (in his words) as a "colonialist attempt to get signatures from poor people around the world". He said this was misleading because more than 50% of registered users at the time were from richer countries such as Norway, Finland and European countries. Their goal is to test registration in developed and developing regions, in hot and cold climates, in urban and rural areas, to better understand what works and what doesn't.

Mistakes are a natural part of growth for any large-scale project, according to Altman. "With any new system, you're going to be exposed to some initial fraud, which is part of the reason we've been doing this for a long time in [this] slow beta phase. To understand how the system is open to abuse, and how we're going to mitigate that. I don't know of a system that's been this big, this ambitious, and doesn't have a problem with fraud at all. We want to be very thoughtful about that."

One of the mitigations is to change the way Orb operators are compensated. Currently, there are 200 to 250 active spheres in the field, and about a few dozen operators, each employing their own sub-team. In the beginning, Worldcoin simply paid operators based on the number of raw sign-ups, which led to some sloppy and shoddy practices.

Operators are now incentivized not only by the number of signups, but also by the quality of signups, and how well users know what's going on, Blania says; after a few weeks of Orb scans, operators are paid more if users do use Worldapp. (The main way you "use" Worldapp now is by claiming a weekly Worldcoin.) I spoke to two operators in Spain, Gonzalo Recio and Juan Chacon, who largely approve of the new protocol, but whether the process is strictly followed globally remains an open question.

How can people believe that Worldcoin actually solves these problems? Altman hears the questions, and he knows he's unlikely to win over the doubters, but he doesn't seem to mind. He believes the more convincing answers come not from him, Blania, or the company, but from Worldcoin's early adopters. "You can try to answer a bunch of questions and do all these things, but that's not really how it works," he said.

"What really works is the first million people, the early adopters, the people moving forward -- convincing the next 10 million people. Then the next 10 million people are closer to the norm. They're convincing the next billion people. Those are really the norms that convince the other billions."

Policy and Future

During our first conversation, Blania told me that if WorldID and Worldcoin's UBI were to be fully adopted at scale, it would be "probably one of the most profound technological changes of all time". If this is the case, does this create a new and complex set of laws, policies, and even existential questions for governments to consider?

One last question stuck with me as I wrapped up the meeting in the Berlin office. It almost feels like the project is so ambitious, so wild, and so transformative — at least in theory — that those in power haven’t fully considered its ramifications. If humans are compensated not through the sweat of labour, but through artificial general intelligence, wouldn't this represent a fundamental shift in the way the world is structured? Won't the government insist on regulating this? Assuming the answer is yes, how will Worldcoin solve this problem?

Blania leaned back in her chair and thought for a moment. He said: "This is obviously a major discussion point, and I will start with the most important thing right now. And the most important idea is actually far less complicated than all the things you just mentioned." Blania said that they only focus on the basics of US regulatory uncertainty, and Worldcoin "is quite possibly the largest cryptocurrency transaction ever in the world."

Altman pushed back on the notion that policymakers are clueless or slogging along. "I've been to about 22 countries, met a lot of world leaders, and people understand this more than I thought and take it very seriously," he said. (It’s unclear whether by “it” he refers to Worldcoin’s specific ambitions, or the broader challenges posed by artificial intelligence.) “I’m spending more and more time now, not on technical issues, but on policy challenges. Ultimately, in order for the world to move toward good through all this, it has to be a solution that has both technology and policy parts. In a sense, the policy part may become more difficult.”

Policy obstacles are one of the risks facing Worldcoin. Not expanding fast enough is a risk for Worldcoin. More missteps in the field, such as those highlighted in the MIT Tech report, pose another risk. Or iris data could be compromised. Or a failure of token economics. Or the erosion of trust could hinder future registrations. Or the logistical challenges of taking the Orb to trickier corners of the world. Or technical and manufacturing failures. Or discover that the sphere has been damaged in some way. (As Vitalik Buterin pointed out, "The Orb is a hardware device and we cannot verify that it is constructed correctly and has no backdoors.")

Or, maybe Worldcoin will never be worth more than a few cents, so no one cares. There are many, many risks on the long road to widespread adoption for Worldcoin, and the project remains a moonshot.

But as the company's think tank believes, the biggest risk is not that of Worldcoin itself. The creepiest risk to them is that something like a biometric WorldID will be developed, just not in an open or privacy-preserving way.

The original logic that Altman articulated before ChatGPT became mainstream is still compelling: eventually AI will get so good that it can easily pretend to be human, so we need a way to prove our humanity. Maybe biometric proof is inevitable. Who should be the steward of the solution? "Things like WorldID need to happen," Blania said. "You need to authenticate yourself online. Something like that is going to happen. The default path is that it's not online per se, it doesn't protect privacy, and it's fragmented by governments and countries."

For Blania, the non-private version of biometric censorship is the real Black Mirror plot. "It's the default path, and I think Worldcoin is the only path," he said.