OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has raised almost $100 million for his global crypto ID project Worldcoin. This bizarre new service, which the New York Post described as “creepy,” has a really strange business model: it will give away cryptocurrency in exchange for allowing its “Orb” to scan your eyeballs. Yes, you heard that right.
This is so weird that even Sam Bankman-Fried – yes that Sam-Bankman Fried who is currently charged with numerous felonies related to alleged fraud after his own crypto exchange imploded – is reportedly one of Worldcoin’s investors.
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Worldcoin says it is building the world’s “largest identity and financial network as a public utility, giving ownership to everyone.” The company says it aims to create universal access to the global economy regardless of country or background, accelerating the transition to an economic future that welcomes and benefits every person on the planet.
This is all related to Sam Altman’s quest to promote more AI in the world.
Sam Altman said in a talk during the Stripe conference last week, “If you really want to make the biggest, most capable super intelligent system you can, you need high amounts of energy. And if you have an A.I. that can help you move faster and do better material science, you can probably get to fusion a little bit faster too.”
And the man whose firm created ChatGPT is confident that the costs of AI tech will be reduced in the future, thereby aiding in its advancement. He painted an optimistic picture of the future saying, “probably we will get to a world where in addition to the cost of intelligence falling dramatically, the cost of energy falls dramatically, too. And if both of those things happen at the same time—I would argue that they are currently the two most important inputs in the whole economy—we get to a super different place.”
ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is a chatbot that was launched by OpenAI in November 2022. Chatbot.com explains that a chatbot is software that simulates human-like conversations with users via chat. Its key task is to answer user questions with instant messages. OpenAI is an artificial intelligence (AI) research laboratory run by the for-profit corporation OpenAI LP and its parent company, the non-profit OpenAI Inc.
Sam Altman was born in St. Louis Missouri to a Jewish family in 1985. Altman studied computer science at Stanford, but never completed his B.A. When he was only 19-years-old, Altman co-founded Loopta location-based social networking mobile application, and managed to raise $30 million for the new company at such a young age.
Sam Altman joined Y Combinator, an American technology startup accelerator, and became its president just three years later. Then in 2015, he established YC Continuity, a $700 million equity fund investing in YC companies as they matured.
In March of this year, Sam Altman took part in a $180 million investment in Retro Biosciences, a medtech startup that says it will add 10 years to a healthy human lifespan, starting with cellular reprogramming, autophagy, and plasma-inspired therapeutics.
