Altman's new World: Smaller name, even bigger vision

Catch up quick: The company's vision is to collect the unique biometric signature of everyone on the planet by scanning their irises.

• Participants are sometimes, though not always, rewarded with cryptocurrency.
• With this data, the company plans to build a universal identity system of unique verifiers for humans.
• Altman co-founded the firm in 2019, the same year he became CEO of OpenAI. Tools for Humanity, as the entity that builds World's technology is known, has raised approximately $200 million from Blockchain Capital, Distributed Global and the crypto funds of Bain Capital and Andreessen Horowitz.

Between the lines: Having to prove you are human is arguably a problem we wouldn't have without AI, but it's becoming a real issue nonetheless.

• Asked at Thursday's event whether he didn't create the problem he was now trying to solve, Altman responded: "I really don't view it as us creating a problem over here and solving it over there."
• "It did occur to us early on" — presumably at OpenAI — "that it would be great to have ways for people to authenticate personhood. But I think that that's going to be important for lots of reasons, of which AI and our version of AI are only one."

Zoom in: World announced several advances on Thursday, including a more powerful version of its Orb, a spherical computer that does the iris-scanning work.

• The new Orb is powered by Nvidia's latest Jetson chipset and has nearly five times the AI performance as before. It also uses fewer parts.
• World says the new Orb will allow for a broader roll-out. It plans self-service kiosks as well as on-demand scans, where it will send an Orb out to individual homes or businesses.

World also announced an option for people to join its identity project, at least in a limited form, without having their iris scanned.

• This method allows people to scan a passport that has an NFC-enabling chip. World says such a scan will allow people to verify their age, nationality and passport ownership without sharing their identity.

The big picture: World aims to position itself as the company with the best solution to the identity issue, and then find ways to make money.

• In addition to the cryptocurrency it controls, World also aims to build a range of services that sit on top of its identity-verification platform. One example of this is the effort to turn its mobile app into a "Super App" that can run a range of third-party mini apps.
• Among those shown Thursday was a polling app which could assure you that every respondent was a different human being, with no risk of repeat entries or bot interference.

Zoom out: Plenty of people and communities remain turned off by World's biometric-based approach, which has raised privacy concerns and drawn regulatory rebukes from Africa to Asia to Europe.

Yes, but: Co-founder Alex Blania told Axios that the tone of conversations has shifted over the last year as deepfake and bot problems have become more real.

• "In the beginning, conversations with governments were pretty close to, 'What are you doing here? ... Data like this isn't even needed,'" Blania said in an interview with Axios at Thursday's event. "And in the last year, that really changed quite drastically."
• Governments are now inviting World into discussions, Blania said, and in some cases forming partnerships around digital identity verification, as the company has done with Taiwan and Malaysia. "I think there will be many, many more like this coming," Blania said.