Source: Bankless Podcast; Compilation: 0x 711, kaori, BlockBeats

On July 24th, Worldcoin released an open letter signed by Sam Altman, announcing the official launch of WLD. The letter pointed out that Worldcoin has been established for more than three years to create a new identity and financial network owned by all people. The launch of Worldcoin begins today, and if successful, it will significantly increase economic opportunity, provide a reliable solution for distinguishing AI from humans while preserving privacy, advance global democratic processes, and ultimately may demonstrate a potential path to an AI-funded global basic income (AI-funded UBI).

On the same day, the well-known encrypted podcast program Bankeless interviewed Alex Blania and Sam Altman, the two co-founders of Worldcoin, on May 14, also published on the Youtube platform. The interviews covered issues such as the Worldcoin project vision, Orb device security, privacy, and WorldCoin's future development plans. The translations are organized as follows.

Worldcoin project origin and original idea

**Bankless: Worldcoin is one of the most ambitious projects in the crypto space. The project has a token, a proprietary Layer 2 network, an identity protocol, and a mobile application. Of course, the most memorable is the iconic Worldcoin hardware - the silver Orb. Worldcoin's philosophy is that the single, best way to authenticate "being human" is through human biometrics associated with our unique DNA. Sam, can you talk about the origin of the idea of Worldcoin? Where did it come from, and why do we need Worldcoin? **

Sam Altman: I was thinking initially that if you could have the largest network, say the largest financial and identity network imaginable, then it would be a very powerful, truly global network. When we first started talking about this idea, I thought about how we scan the palm of every person in the world, is there any other complicated way to verify identity?

The reason I'm excited about this is that as the world moves toward powerful AI systems, I think it would be very important if we could do something that ultimately redistributes wealth -- maybe even access to these systems, which will someday be the most important component of wealth -- but also preserve privacy with a different perspective, which will become increasingly important as AI advances.

So, I started thinking about this question many years ago, mainly driven by my work at OpenAI. At the same time, I also think UBI (Universal Basic Income, Universal Basic Income) is a cool thing worth studying. Although my ideas were still largely lacking at the time, I still wanted to explore this field. Later I met Max and Alex, I think Alex is very good, I will let Alex talk about how this project has come to this day step by step, because Alex can be said to have contributed a lot to it.

**Bankless: So Worldcoin can be said to be a project that kills two birds with one stone, right? Both UBI and identity, before you have an actual solution, you've already figured out how to achieve both, right? **

Sam Altman: Yes, if you look at it from a higher perspective, it actually solves the problem of verifying "human beings". This is the basis for solving the problem, and it would be perfect if there was a non-fraud solution to do this while also preserving privacy.

**Bankless: Let’s talk about how Sam and Alex met, when the idea for Worldcoin might have come about, and how Alex joined the project? **

Alex Blania: We really started working on it in January 2020. I think Sam and Max had been working on it for 6 months before then, but Max had a full-time job, and so apparently did Sam. So when I joined, we put together the founding team and then really started working on it. Before Worldcoin, I mainly studied theoretical physics and how to use deep learning to predict AI systems, so I didn't have much to do with encryption. I actually read about Bitcoin very early on, so I'm sort of early in the crypto space, but I can't say I was very knowledgeable about crypto before Worldcoin. Then Max sent me an email with the Worldcoin white paper at the time and the original idea, very high-level idea, explaining the importance of the project and where it might go. I drove to San Francisco, had a few conversations with Max, then an interview with Sam, and we spent more time together before I became a co-founder of the project.

**Bankless: Was Worldcoin a crypto project from the start? **

Alex Blania: Yeah, I think so.

**Bankless: Sam, your original idea was to scan palm prints, but Worldcoin doesn't do that. It chose the iris. Can you talk about this choice? Then we can start digging into the technology inside the Orb. **

Sam Altman: As Alex said just now, the initial idea of the project was concentrated in a paper. A major problem is that you basically need to address citizen resistance in order to distribute tokens to everyone. Why are you doing this? Because it will inspire a really large network scale to grow to all mankind, and really guide this huge financial network. Of course, you can also distribute UBI in this way. So when you want to do this, you want to launch a token to benefit all mankind, and then the first big problem you have to solve is what is often said in the crypto circles Citizen resistance. I am sure you are very familiar with this. Simply put, this means that a person is able to prove to the network that that person is, in fact, unique within that network. Why is this important? Because what happens if you don't? Bad guys will just disrupt the entire token distribution mechanism and everything will fall apart. As you know, this still happens frequently today in the crypto space. If you really want to scale this up to all of humanity, that's a bigger problem.

Obviously, this is one of the biggest problems we have to tackle first. And then we did a pretty deep dive. The entire founding team is mostly from Caltech or the Max Planck Institute, and we all have backgrounds in physics. We researched the entire industry and came up with three feasible solutions:

One is KYC, utilizing the government’s citizenship verification system. But this option was immediately ruled out because less than half of the world's population has a digitally verifiable ID. Considering inclusiveness, this scheme is not scalable. It might work very well in Europe, the US, but it won't work globally.

The second major direction is the so-called Web of Trust. Try to build a web of relationships based on trust. It was a very idealized idea, but it was never really realized or expanded. But I think this is something that Worldcoin can introduce in the future, we can discuss it later.

The last option is biometrics. So we actually implemented the demos of these three schemes. After much deliberation, we decided to use the biometric method. Before we talk about specific recognition modes, you first need to understand that all the things you use in your daily life, like an iPhone, all it does is re-authenticate you. It stores your facial features, and then when you try to log into the same phone again, it calculates approximately the same feature vector, and you can use the phone after the comparison is passed. This is just a one-to-one comparison, which is relatively easy to implement. But to solve the provably uniqueness of humans problem, you need to compare one user with all other users. This requires collecting more information on each user to achieve, otherwise the fraud rate will increase exponentially, and it will actually hit a bottleneck. this point is very important. The fraud rate is not a fixed value, but you will suddenly hit a ceiling. Things like facial images don't have enough information entropy. Fingerprints also don't have enough information entropy. In theory, palm prints are possible, but there is no ready-made commercial solution, and the iris is the key.

**Bankless: You mean that information such as facial images is not "unique" enough for credible natural person verification, right? **

Sam Altman: Exactly, at least if you just use a regular phone camera.

**Bankless: Okay, so when you were looking for a way to authenticate a natural person, you came to the conclusion that government IDs wouldn't work because that didn't fit the philosophy of cryptocurrencies. You also talked about the network trust model, which exists in the cryptocurrency world, but it is still relatively experimental. Therefore to establish a unique human identity, biometric solutions are the most reliable and proven models. That's why you choose iris scanning. I guess the information entropy of iris is very high, of this order of magnitude, right? **

Alex Blania: Yes, you are absolutely right.

Technical principle of Orb

**Bankless: So this also explains why Worldcoin exists in the way it is now, and why it needs hardware such as Orb. Worldcoin can only operate in the encrypted field if it only relies on national IDs like the United States, or only uses a network trust model. But since we need to collect actual biometric information and map it to a person's DNA to determine uniqueness, we actually have to build a real-world solution, which is why Orb is needed. Can you briefly describe the technology behind the Orb and how it does what it does? **

Alex Blania: Like you just summarized, the way this project changes the world is very important. Digital content (images or videos) and intelligent algorithms can no longer tell the difference between a human being. So you actually need to connect to the real world, and I think that's the only way to get around this.

We started making Orbs very early on. We did a lot of engineering and even designed a custom camera. The Orb has a number of sensors that detect if what we're seeing is a real person and not a monitor or an AI trying to trick us. All these calculations are done locally. Therefore, the first step is to confirm that the subject is a human being. Second, the eye is photographed, and the unique code of the iris is calculated by the neural network and then signed by the Orb device, which is the only information leaving the device. This is very important and very cool, that is, the uniqueness check is separated from the user's wallet and implemented through zero-knowledge proof. That is, we or anyone else can only prove whether a user has been authenticated before, and no other information.

I think Worldcoin offers an option to make it private, open source, and decentralized. So, I know it might sound counter-intuitive at first because it involves biometrics and so on, but if you really understand the engineering behind it, I don't think there's a privacy issue that people worry about.

**Bankless: Of course. I understand that scanning via iris is an established technology. As far as I know, most of the technology in the Orb is actually used to prevent humans from fooling the Orb. It scans your iris, that's what it does. But most of the technology in the Orb is used to make sure humans don't cheat in getting iris scans. Can you explain the layers of technology included in the Orb? **

Alex Blania: Orb actually solves two main problems, fraud prevention as you said. This can be broken down into two points: one is showing the device content that is not from a real human being; the other is directly physically attacking the device itself. So you can go directly to the processor and try to insert data streams that are not coming from imaging. This is the first point. The second point is imaging resolution. None of the biometric devices we tested had a high enough resolution to scale to the entire human population. They don't have a high enough resolution, which is why we have to make our own lenses and imaging systems etc. It also took a lot of work.

So I think a similar amount of engineering went into both. But regarding your question, Orb has multi-spectral sensors on the front that capture images in multiple wavelengths such as infrared, 3D time-of-flight, etc. to make sure that we are seeing humans. You could show a display or more complex optics to trick it. This required quite a bit of engineering to achieve. Then, the cool thing is, all the processing is done locally on the device, so there are several neural networks doing all these checks in real time. This is important to protect privacy.

How WorldCoin Solved Privacy Issues

**Bankless: One of the concerns about the WorldCoin project is privacy. Now that you can prove a person is human by scanning an iris, how does WorldCoin solve the privacy problem? **

Alex Blania: First, we agree on the seriousness of the privacy concerns. This is why we are very careful when designing WorldCoin. Indeed, biometrics can be disconcerting at first glance. But if you really understand the engineering principles behind it, you will find that these concerns are actually unfounded. WorldCoin addresses privacy concerns in three main areas:

First, biometric data will not be stored. The image scanning is done on the local device, the calculations are done locally on the device, and only the Orb-signed iris code leaves the device. These codes are used to match against all users.

Second, and most importantly, through zero-knowledge proofs, identity uniqueness verification is separated from user wallets. This gives great privacy protection.

Third, the entire setup is self-hosted. When users register, they will have a non-custodial wallet, and then generate a zero-knowledge proof to prove that they are a member of the user group.

I don't think there is any other solution that solves the same problem at this scale with almost zero privacy risk. Additionally, all code will be open source. Most of the hardware has been open sourced, and the firmware code is slowly being open sourced. The whole setup will also be fully decentralized, which of course will be difficult, but we will make it happen. We have invested a lot of time and resources into building WorldCoin in this way.

**Bankless: Understanding this system at a high level, there seem to be many moving parts. The system includes hardware inside the sphere, zero-knowledge cryptography, and mobile phone applications. Can you elaborate on how a person authenticates with an iris scan, turns that into data, and then through a series of steps converts it into something that someone can authenticate to log in to in their WorldCoin application? Can you talk about the transmission of data, the processing of data in the iris scanner, and zero-knowledge proofs? Can you describe an end-to-end process from an iris scan to someone's phone? **

**Alex Blania:**Okay, let me try to explain how the system works. Users are interested in WorldCoin and download the World App after learning about it (currently it is the only client of WorldCoin, but other wallets will also support it in the future). Users find nearby Orb devices on a map and appear in person. When verifying, the user clicks "Verify Now" to generate two pairs of key pairs, one pair is the Ethereum wallet key, and the second pair is the identity wallet key. Both pairs of keys are stored on the user's mobile phone.

When authenticating, the user presents the public key to the device. Then Orb first checks the natural person, followed by the uniqueness check, that is, takes the eye image, uses the neural network to calculate the unique feature code, and signs it with the private key. The signed feature code is the only data that leaves the device and is sent to the backend server for verification (the backend will also be decentralized).

Then when the user uses the World ID, the zero-knowledge proof is used to prove that the public key has been included in the user collection. This allows users to use this proof in different ecosystems, not only in Ethereum, but also bridged to other chains, or used in web login without revealing any personal information.

In addition, based on this "natural person proof" concept, WorldID is also an identity protocol, allowing developers to attach other verifiable credentials, etc. So its function is not only human verification. In short, this is the whole process from eye scanning to mobile phone.

**Bankless: Worldcoin doesn't ask for your name, date of birth or address during the verification process does it? **

Alex Blania: No, the only time this issue will arise is when you are using a deposit and withdrawal solution, because in the app, also in WorldApp, there is a non-custodial wallet, you can withdraw funds through deposit and withdrawal providers, they will ask for your name, but this is not us. In conclusion, in the WorldCoin system, your name, date of birth, address or similar information is not required.

The intersection of Worldcoin and AI

**Bankless: So it can be said that Worldcoin provides public addresses for mankind, right? And this address is derived in a way that is verifiable by humans. Sam, you're one of the co-founders of WorldCoin, and from an OpenAI perspective, you see that having a list of verifiable human addresses would be very useful in the age of AI. So why do we need this kind of address in the next decade or century? **

Sam Altman: I think there will be other reasons in the future besides the ones I mentioned now. I think it's very important that in an era where AI is being developed as a tool for humans, I think the benefits that will come from them will be many, access, governance, and so on, that will belong to real humans. We like many advantages of the WorldCoin solution. As Alex just explained, although the privacy perspective is different than what people used to think, I think it's a very fascinating one. I also think it's a very fair system. It might be the most inclusive system we can imagine.

**Bankless: Alex, have you seen any other use cases in the crypto space? Airdrops are another, but since we don't have proof of natural persons, the distribution of Tokens has been downplayed. **

Alex Blania: I’m starting with cryptocurrencies first, and then we can broaden that out a bit. I've traveled to many different countries and talked to many users in Latin America, Europe and Africa. I think there are a lot of financial primitives that the crypto space technically has to offer, but are currently not implemented for a few different reasons. One reason is user experience, but a bigger reason is that you need reputation to enable these features. The idea of credit scoring, basically an on-chain credit scoring so you can take low collateral loans, I think it's a big concept and hopefully it's coming. The natural person certificate is the basis of identity. It's not identity, it's different because identity means I'm a unique person, it's my name, that's my date of birth, or that's my Github account. So human proofs are like the fundamental building blocks that make all of these things happen.

**Bankless: Sam, most people know you through OpenAI and ChatGPT. What specific avenues do you see integrating OpenAI and WorldCoin? **

Sam Altman: I think it's too early to talk about specifics, but hopefully it will emerge as we watch the process over the next decade.

**Bankless: How does the actual distribution of Worldcoin take place? How did it get to people? And what does the distribution plan look like? How do I get WLD? how much can i get What are the details? **

Alex Blania: There are many details that we cannot talk about here because of regulatory uncertainty in the US. So we won't go into the details here, but the overall mechanics are pretty simple. You download an app, get verified with an orb, and then at some point you get your physical person certificate, after which you receive WLD every week. The entire system is built on such a foundation that it can scale to billions of people. This will continue for the next decade or so.

**Bankless: Will there be incentives for those who get your Worldcoin ID early? **

Alex Blania: The whole process is not just about the Worldcoin ID. At launch, Worldcoin consists of the three parts we talked about: Worldcoin, World ID, and World Dapp. Worldcoin is a protocol designed to scale to all of humanity, something we have never seen before because there has never been civil resistance before. What will be more important in the next ten years? Token or World ID? It's all unknowns, as we've never seen a token held by 3 billion people.

**B****ankless: The Worldcoin project has many ambitious components. There are orbs, which are hardware components that are cutting edge in hardware themselves. There are frontiers of tokens, which have their own distribution mechanism. There are mobile apps. There's also the actual scanning work. And then we haven't talked about the second layer built on top of the OP stack, there are a lot of moving parts. So what's it like to manage a startup that needs to be extremely high-level in so many areas? **

Alex Blania: It's been a crazy ride indeed. Because I think people always forget that in the beginning, there were really only four of us. We both just graduated from college so never worked anywhere. Now it's a huge team of 180 people, spread across different fields, working together to achieve this goal. As you said, we have a fairly mature hardware team, protocol team, economic team, and artificial intelligence team. There's a lot going on here, a lot of moving parts. So it was definitely a pretty exciting experience. And then over time, it went from focusing on hardware in the early days to focusing on product, and now it's focusing on operations. So it's going to be a huge operating machine.

Sam Altman: It was cool to watch the Worldcoin team take on new challenges. One of my favorite things about startups is watching people learn how much they can get done and how much they can do. Especially for small teams. I can't remember who I first heard it from, but there's a somewhat famous saying in startups that if you know how hard it's going to be, you'll never start. So it's important to be a little naive in the beginning. Small teams of smart, driven, and cohesive people can accomplish a lot more than they realize. But even so, the Worldcoin team certainly exceeded expectations.

**Bankless: Sam, are you more of a day-to-day participant in the WorldCoin project? Maybe not a day-to-day involvement, but where are your touchpoints with WorldCoin? **

Sam Altman: Whatever Alex needs, I will try to help. But this looks like a huge difference, I'll try to help wherever I can.

Cooperation between WorldCoin and Optimism

**Bankless: WorldCoin recently announced that it will issue tokens on the Optimism mainnet. Please explain in detail the reasons and significance of this decision. **

Sam Altman: Okay, actually what we announced last week is that the token itself will be issued on the Optimism mainnet. So we didn't announce the second layer of the OP stack. We will of course do our own Layer 2 at some point, but not at launch, which will come later this year. Why Choose Optimism? In fact, they've given us a lot of feedback on the entire tech stack over the past few months. Just two months ago, we decided we had to reinforce that and really start working together. Of course, it starts with migration, but it's much more than that. We will collaborate on identity primitives and of course Base. So yes, many things will happen. So the simple implementation is to put WorldCoin on Optimism. This is the beginning.

**Bankless: In other words, WorldCoin will also use the Optimism chain for other infrastructure? **

Alex Blania: Yes, WorldCoin's infrastructure will also use the Optimism chain. So WorldID is completely independent, because WorldID is essentially a Merkle tree, which lives on the Ethereum mainnet, and users can then prove inclusion. Then this will bridge to different ecosystems. So this is not just the case for Ethereum. WLD will be issued on the OP mainnet, and then later this year, we will have our own Layer 2.

WorldCoin Expansion Strategy

**Bankless: So how many irises have been scanned so far? How many people got a WorldCoin ID? What has been the strategy so far? **

Sam Altman: Of course. So far (May 14th) it's 1.7 million. All of this is just the beginning for us. So now it's 210 devices. Most of the time there are only about 50 devices, mainly because we have to iterate on the product. Scale matters only after everything is launched. So we're only a few weeks away from launch, which is why we're talking about it now. What is the strategy? In the early stages of the project, the question was, when you go out in public with an Orb, how many people will sign up? Does this actually work? Can you generate enough throughput with one of these devices to practically scale to the billions? This is our initial definition of product market fit, what size it has to be. So we built a prototype, and it was me running all over Berlin, signing up users with these devices. I still remember at that time, one of my colleagues, Sandro, he completed 70 registrations a day. With those 70 registrations per day, we closed our Series A round at that time. Because if you take 70 registrations a day, multiply it by a week, then you get triple, I mean, 300 to 500 registrations a week at the time. This means that tens of thousands of devices are sufficient to scale up to billions. That's one of the things that was very surprising at the time. From there, it's been like an early proof-of-concept for Phase 1. Then in the second stage we globalized it. We have 15 devices and we're trying to deploy them all over the world and in many different markets to see if there are any fundamental roadblocks that we don't know about. So we went from Tromsø, Norway, where capacitors exploded because it was too cold, to Nairobi, Kenya, to Latin America, all during COVID. So it's been quite a tortuous journey. We had some team members who traveled through five different countries before finally arriving at the one we really wanted to go to because of COVID. More recently, we now have O-Pacific, a more professional team in this area. We focus on four markets, Buenos Aires in Argentina, Lisbon in Portugal, Nairobi in Kenya, and Bangalore and Delhi in India. These four markets, as they are the perfect launch pads for larger regions. So if you want to build products, these are the four areas we think you should start with. So we're basically sending product teams to all four of those locations. I go to them as often as I can, and we'll expand from there.

**Bankless: You can't hire every Orb operator to cover the entire population of the world, can you? So how do you spread the Orb around the world so operators can use it? Do you hire every Orb operator? What is the strategy here? **

Alex Blania: No, Worldcoin actually has to be a decentralized protocol. So it's not a strategy. The way it works is that when you operate an Orb, you get paid from the protocol for each registration. In addition, there are many incentive mechanisms.

**Bankless: Orb itself is an affiliate program? **

Alex Blania: In a sense yes. There are a lot of incentives behind it to really make it work, but that's where it's going. Then the Worldcoin Foundation basically just sets the standard, and then other people will be able to produce their own hardware devices and connect to the protocol. This is just the first stage of a larger process that is estimated to take 10 years to complete decentralization. Eventually everyone can produce Orbs, and eventually everyone can operate them. The protocol basically pays people.

**Bankless: Interesting. The Orb effectively becomes a commercial product that anyone willing to participate can make. There is also some sort of financial incentive from the protocol that encourages Orb makers to make Orbs. So, what are the lessons learned from the grassroots experiences of Orb operators? What is it like to manage these people since they are not actual company members? **

Sam Altman: Now we have a team that has worked on Airbnb, Uber, and all of these companies. They bring a lot of experience on how to operate these decentralized models. There are a lot of issues around quality control and fraud detection and so on that we don't need to discuss in depth. But the other thing is, empower the user as much as possible, so put as much functionality into the app as possible, educate the user as much as possible before signing up.

**Bankless: Yes. I don't think humanity has ever seen such a malleable project. Alex, in your opinion, where are we now on the WorldCoin roadmap? How much work is left to do? **

**Alex Blania:**Sam said WorldCoin has progressed and professionalized more than expected, so we might be a little bit ahead on the roadmap. We're still in the early days of this big project, and there's still a lot of work to be done to achieve global coverage. But so far we've made good progress, laying the groundwork for what's to come. The key is to maintain momentum and continue to iterate and scale. Attract more users and developers to the ecosystem by building valuable products. The whole decentralization and incentive mechanism will also take time to develop. So there's still a long way to go, but the outlook is positive. Keeping focus on users and staying agile, we can achieve the ultimate vision.

Sam Altman: We have three and a half orders of magnitude growth ahead of us. It's not very early days yet. I also remember the complete mocking from the crypto industry when the Worldcoin project debuted. I think that's the expected outcome, like, put your iris in this Orb, and you get some tokens. It's just a gut reaction, and I think it's understandable. However, one thing I noticed was that it drew talent in a way that I hadn't seen in other projects. There's been a lot of people, in fact it's happened to me twice that I'm in some kind of social situation, some kind of social situation, and someone from the Worldcoin company will come up with an Orb. People inside Worldcoin love these spheres. So the Worldcoin team slowly continued to build, to iterate, to attract some talent, to attract some builders, thinkers, and developers that I respected who were not on the Worldcoin team before.

**Bankless: So not only is the Worldcoin project progressing in its own trajectory, but perceptions around Worldcoin have changed as well. Can you talk about that experience? **

Alex Blania: We didn't really want to announce it at the time. There was a very nasty reporter leak that we had to deal with. So I remember very clearly that we were a super small team. I lost my student visa due to COVID-19. We were stranded in a small town in Germany called Erlangen. I remember getting an email from a Bloomberg reporter around 11pm on a Friday night. If you don't respond, the email says, we'll report it. Then everything went wrong. Everyone said Sam Altman was going to launch the project. So a dozen guys stranded in a small village in Germany trying to cope with it all. This is the earliest stage. But then, as you said, we attracted incredible talent, one of the best teams in the space. Then, a flywheel effect started to happen, and people outside the company got excited too.

**Bankless: It's been an incredible few weeks because of the tremendous excitement and attention we're getting right now. What do you think, Sam? **

Sam Altman: It wasn't that big of a shock to me because I've had similar ups and downs before. But the level of personal attacks and hatred that this project has suffered is really high. I remember one day when I didn't really feel like watching too much Twitter, which I didn't think was healthy, but one day I logged in and spent a long time scrolling through what they were saying. I thought, this is really very personal attack.

**Bankless: Sam, has this happened to you with OpenAI? **

Sam Altman: Yes, OpenAI has very enthusiastic supporters and very enthusiastic opponents. You have to learn to live with both. I think no matter how you interpret the technology and zero-knowledge proofs within the Orb, some people simply can't accept the privacy argument. If they don't like it, they don't have to sign up. I think this is an important point that must be emphasized all the time.

Bankless: Exactly. I talked about this interview in a recent Bankless Weekly, saying that I had breakfast with the Worldcoin folks and it was interesting to have an Orb decoration on the table. Some people said, wow, Bankless is talking to Worldcoin people, it's shocking. So some people hold very extreme views...

Alex Blania: Yeah, as you can imagine, I've had a lot of these conversations. I think 99% of conversations, the answer is usually that the other person didn't actually read the documentation, or didn't try to understand what happened. If you really explain the details carefully, you can usually calm the other person down. The bigger problem is that you don't actually need to trust us, and you won't need to trust us, because a lot of stuff is already open source. We get feedback like this a lot and I think it's completely understandable that not everything is open source yet. Obviously, we're going to move this thing forward as quickly as possible. But in reality we have to make trade-offs. So, don't take our word for it. Look at the documentation and look at the code. If you find something unsatisfactory, literally, communicate with us and we will find a way to solve the problem.

**Bankless: If this interview gets people interested in Worldcoin, what does Worldcoin need most to drive development? What do you most need to change the situation? **

Alex Blania: We're hiring in basically every field. Everything from products to AI. In our case, this is not an AGI, but an edge neural network, which is used to detect various fraudulent attacks. So that requires a different skill set, of course. But it's all about it. If you are good at operations, if you are good at technology, please contact us.

Talk about AI

**Bankless: Can you briefly talk about where you stand on the AI debate? **

Sam Altman: Number one, we need to make more technological advances. We've drawn up a road map of how we think we're going to solve this problem. But it is indisputable that we need new techniques beyond LHF (language model fine-tuning). I don't understand why some people say that since we have LHF, the adjustment problem is solved. Absolutely not like that, and I want to make that very, very clear. So there's still a lot of work to be done in that area.

Second, I think that once we are technologically capable of tuning superintelligence, we need a complex set of international regulatory agreements, cooperation between leading groups. This will require a very complex series of negotiations and agreements, which we are now laying the groundwork for.

Third, how do we limit abusive AI execution. Human misuse of AI will cause great damage or harm to society. So how these restrictions will be formulated, we need to discuss.

**Bankless: Great, Sam and Alex, thank you so much for joining us today. **

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