Worldcoin, the Sam Altman-backed eye-scanning identity company, is dropping the second half of its name as it looks to broaden its already planet-spanning mission.

Driving the news: World, as the company will now be known, looks to focus less on its cryptocurrency roots and more on its effort to ensure humans have a way to verify their identity in a bot-filled world, the company made clear at an event yesterday in San Francisco.

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 an estimated $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 yesterday'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 yesterday, 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 yesterday 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 yesterday'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.

Google notified staff yesterday that it is moving the team behind the Gemini App into the company's broader AI subsidiary, while a key product executive is being replaced, as Axios first reported.

Why it matters: The move puts the team developing its consumer generative AI app within Google DeepMind, the heart of the company's AI research effort.

Google announced the move in a memo from CEO Sundar Pichai, which outlined a handful of organizational changes.

• The Gemini App team, led by Sissie Hsiao, will join Google DeepMind under Demis Hassabis.
• Prabhakar Raghavan — who, as head of knowledge and information products, has overseen a wide swath of Google products including search, ads, Gemini, shopping and maps — will become chief technologist, a new strategy role reporting to Pichai.
• The move puts Raghavan closer to his academic roots, but also takes him away from direct oversight of many of the company's key products.
• Most of Raghavan's current responsibilities, aside from Gemini, will shift to 21-year company veteran Nick Fox, who led the introduction of Google Fi, among other efforts.

What we're watching: Google has had some rocky product rollouts on the consumer end. One measure of this shakeup's success will be whether they improve.

• Google launched a business version of NotebookLM and added a pair of features to make it easier to listen to and customize the virtual podcasts created from NotebookLM data. (Google, Axios)
• OpenAI is testing a Windows version of the ChatGPT app, available now for paid users. (The Verge)
• Perplexity just launched a new AI search tool that lets you get answers from your team's files and the web at the same time. (VentureBeat)
• Scoop: Google says it will block election ads on its platform as soon as the polls close on Nov. 5 in order to help stop misinformation. (Axios)
• X updated its privacy policy to say that, starting Nov. 15, it will allow third parties to train AI models on your data, unless you opt out. (TechCrunch)

Check out these shots from a recent NY Jets game — taken on 35mm film and developed while the game took place.