The Eyeball-Scanning Plan Designed to Save Us From AI

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthal.

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Tracy, do you remember a few weeks ago, or maybe a couple of months ago now, someone made a like a fake AI version of the Odd Lots podcast and they like replicated our voice.

Yes, I think they used chat gpt to do it. And they basically asked chat gpt to create a script for odd Loots and that they had someone replicate another app or something replicated.

It wasn't a someone like I mean, it was like somewhat like other like AI app. It was like, yeah, it was pretty it was pretty good. It was like good. I mean it clearly like was not us.

How much did it worry you, Joe?

I think I'm more of an AI domer worrier than you are.

Interesting.

I mean, I have concerns, don't get me wrong, But what do you think is the worst case scenario? Is it robot taking over the world.

No.

I think that like in a couple of years, the AI will do a really good job of making the Odd Lots podcast. And people say, I don't really need to listen to Joe and Tracy anymore. The AI is I don't know. I'm like, you know, I but I feel like maybe that's all a parandoise.

No, I feel like there is reason for concern. I hope. Maybe I'm just being an optimist here. I hope we are a few years away from the odd Blots replicat.

I know what, I want to do this for like another thirty years, and I don't want to just have like three or four years or a few years.

That's the optimistic scenario. Is it doing this in thirty years time?

Okay?

All right?

AI. Lots of people expressing some worries about.

It, a million different kind of words.

Yeah, and we see all these, you know, good ways that the technology is being used, but also insidious ways. As you pointed out, someone made an Audlots episode. I think that was in a in a very fun spirited way, a nice way. But there are people who use this technology for more nefarious things. Yeah.

I think there was like a sixty minutes recently where like someone was able to like impersonate someone's voice and say, hey, you know, you know, you could imagine this scam where someone's like kids, say hey, I need money or something like that, and they call and it sounds just like them, especially in a couple of years when the tech gets better and it becomes a bit of a crisis in the sense it's like, do I know that a person is a person when they talk to me on a zoom,

Well, even on Twitter on a much more basic level, you have all these bots, and I don't know about you, but there seems to be a new Tracy Alloway with the l as like an I and fooling everyone almost like every few weeks, and then you have to go through the whole bureaucracy of reporting to Twitter and proving that you are in fact the original Tracy alloyway.

And not to get into much of a tangent, but wasn't Elon going to solve this because he said like, oh, I'm buying Twitter to solve the bots problem, and I don't, as you say, it's not been solved.

I think that's a whole other episode.

But even with like really rudimentary like human you know, fake traces and fake Joe's like, that's the most rudimentary thing, just like taking our avatar and like changing like one of the l's and trade in L a way to like an I or whatever or one like. That's just gonna get worse.

You know what's a really good business model creating a problem and then creating the solution to it.

Yes, that's exactly right. So you have all So we have all of these ais, and they're going to like replicate us, They're going to look like us, or they're going to talk like us. But the good news, in a sense good is that others are working out the problem of how do you prove that you are who you are in a world in which AIS can replicate our voices and our faces and our expression.

Technology can save us from technology?

Is the thrust of this, right exactly. So we are going to be speaking to someone working on the technology designed to address this concern in part. And as you say, some of the people working on it are some of the same peopleeople behind some of the most cutting edge AI research that's sort of like blowing everyone's minds in both good and scary ways these days.

So I'm just going to go ahead and lay out my priors here, which are that I find this sort of instinctively dystopian the topic of this podcast what we're going to be discussing. This technology creeps me out a little bit. But that said, I don't know that much about it. I don't know much about how it works, and so I am very interested to hear the bowl case on eyeball scanning.

So you just jump bright. We're going to be talking eyeball scanning. We are going to be speaking with Alex Blania. He is the co founder of world Coin, an entity that was set up also by Sam Altman, who everybody a name that everybody knows now because he's the co founder or the founder of open ai, which powers chad GPT and other tools. Other co founder Max nor Frenstern. We're going to be talking about how an eyeball scanner can allow us to theoretically prove our human in this

Thank you for having me. I'm excited to talk.

So I'm trying to think, I mean, like the threat, how real is it that you know, in a few years do you think not whether AI will be able to create a perfect replica of the podcast, but that let's say we're having this conversation and I might really not know that I am talking to the real Alex Blania versus an AI that could perfectly replicate your voice and replicate your face. Like is that two years away? Is that three years away? Like? How soon is that coming?

Well? I think partially we are already there. Right the.

Technology is not completely open source yet, so you don't have widely deployed, deployed systems that can't do that, but rather you have right now you have like a few teas that actually can do things like that or would be able to do things like that. But this is going to change because of course the progress is increasing. So you had it started with Dolly and you had stable diffusion and many other things that on the image

I'm just thinking, like half the people I argue with on Twitter probably are.

Bots neural networks.

Yeah, well, maybe just to step back in time a little bit, I mean, world coin has been around for a few years now, and to some degree, as Joe mentioned, you guys kind of anticipated this threat. What was the sort of aha moment that made this all come together, Like, how did this actually develop into a company, and what was the use case thesis when you were just setting.

Out, Well, we honestly did not. We didn't start off to solve a threat, all right, that is not brief history in time. Sure, back then, I did research.

So we started the company a little bit over three years ago.

And I was doing research in deep learning applied to quantum physics. So I basically predicted quantum system of neural networks and that's I think it's a very promising field in physics. And Sam was already working on the idea overall kind together with Max, so I think they've already been on it for like six months. But of course Sam had a full time job at opening Ie. Max had a full time job back then, so it was

Proceed, but.

To go back to the initial proposition, and I think that is very important. It's not about solving a threat, but rather how I mean, Sam was already breaking in open EIE and this was three years ago, so back then it was not yet an accepted topic that AI is going to happen and it's going to be as powerful as today.

It was like a very.

Niche topic I think, although open of course was already quite famous entity. But of course Sam was motivated by the idea of AI and what it's going to do to the world and it's going to be this very

But it goes as far as.

We think eventually UBI will become a thing, and it actually is like a big chance if you have like a very very powerful technology and it's not about kind of political redistribution, but you have a very centralizing technology that you want to share the upside with the world with. And there was another motivation, kind of Rokin can actually be the infrastructure to do that, because you have a very capable identity system, you have an economic system that

So let's just jump right to it. If you're listening people who are listening to this podcast, you might want to actually watch the video version. We're recording this on video as well. People just the audio butt here on the set. I'm just gonna I was gonna wait a little while before unveiling it, but this is I'm holding in my.

Hand like we need extra music, a big.

Orb It feels about six pounds. I don't know how heavy is this, Alex, I'm sure you know the exact weight.

It's a little bit over one kilogram.

Oh okay, so I was wrong on So that's like just on like about two and a half pounds, Okay, okay, that's fine, about two and have found and it's an eyeball scanner, and so here it is, and it's not working right now, or we're not scanning right now, so I can like tilt this in our face. It's not scanning. But let's like talk about what this piece of hardware that I'm actually holding it is that I'm going to set it on the table in front of me. There's an eyeball scanner. What does it do?

So the show to answer is one it will start with shortened than the longer answer. The short answer is that it first ensures that whatever is interacting with the device, is an actual human being, So okay, not a display, not a photograph of an eyeball, not a photograph or like more sophisticated optical attacks, because there's like many.

Things that you can do here.

So that's the first step checking that whatever we see is an actual human being. And then the second piece is it takes an image of my eye, calculates a unique embedding out of this picture. Everything happens on a device, and that embedding then signed by the device, and that's then the only thing that actually leaves the device and gets compared against all other users. And if that uniqueness check is successful, then me that I just verified with an ORB I then can later do a zero knowledge

But yeah, that's it.

Yeah, maybe just to help us get to the why, you could talk about what would be a practical use case for this technology. Because if I think about something like you know, you mentioned UBI universal Basic income. If I think a government starts some sort of UBI program, then I would assume that they identify people by something like a social Security number or whatever the equivalent might be in that country. So what does this do that those traditional systems of identity.

Do not well?

So when you start with traditional identity, the really hard thing for governments is actually making sure everyone only has one password, and that is with an identity is called deduplication. It's a really hard problem because all the systems, all the technologies you use usually in your life, let's say your iPhone Phase ID. What that actually does is just it re authenticates you, so it realizes I'm the same

But that's a huge number of people.

That just don't have it right, And so I think United States is pretty good, or at least decent. It's actually not a really good at any solution. Europe in parts is pretty capable. The strongest is India, although there's definitely privacy concerns here because they don't use you knowledge proofs and things like that.

But for example, India.

They have a program called at HOR that also used ours recognition to kind of roll out to the global population and it really accelerated the whole economy like crazy. So they had at HOR and then they build UPI on Top, which is a payment rail, and so whenever you talk to people that are in that kind of area of technology, everyone always brings up India as the most prominent example of like what identity plus a strong financial rail can actually do to accelerate an economy.

So, and this is what roll coin is doing. Basically, roll coin.

Is is able to create a d duplication set, so it provides me with the ability to prove that I'm actually unique against everyone else. But then also there's a world ID, which is an identity protocol on top of that.

And let's start with the basics.

So the first thing I could do is I could log into Twitter and I could say I don't already have a Twitter account without actually really my name, And then a few things a little bit forward. You could even cryptographically sign every tweet you make, so that you kind of lay a trace of like, okay, this is

So that's the basic.

But then with rold eddy, which is a protocol that lets you add verifiable credentials and many other things, with an identity space, you can actually bootstop a whole identity system on top.

So this was like a quick grant. But no, it's good.

So it's not that it's proving that you are, you know, a Joe Wisenthal or a Tracy Alloway. It's proving that there is only one of you without necessarily the ID attached or the name attached.

That is exactly so that that is the I.

That is the whole point because then but then what we're id lets you do so if you're not into crypto, but this whole idea of self custody is very important, right of course, I'm pretty sure.

It came up before.

What that lets you do is you basically you verify for well, can you receive your world Eddy? And then it might be that for some applications you actually want to prove that you're over eighteen or you're Joe viisatal.

So I think, God, I've I have like hundreds of questions. There are so many different ways. So you know, one basic but one idea. You keep mentioning zero knowledge proven just to sort of like the basic idea, And this is the shortest. Like you know, I go to websites,

Well, I mean that that one is actually tricky because in that cause you would reveal the social security number. What is a much more what is a much better way to explain it is a website asks you are you on any kinds of sanctional list?

Right?

Right?

Or are you over eighteen? Or are you actually a US citizen?

Right?

And then these things you could prove of zon knowledge And then basically what comes out of this is like approve runs on your phone that you're not included in a sanctions list. Let's say and that the only thing that comes out and ends up with the website is yes or no. But the website does not know what is the social security number you check against it.

So then the other question I have, and the obvious thing is look, scanning your eyeball it's gonna make anyone anxious, and I'm like totally upward even I'm like, you know,

Okay, so there there's many things here. Yeah, we've got to start.

I'm going to start with explaining how to develop comfort around the idea and why why it's necessary. So, first of all, I hated the idea of building the door, like when we.

Actually started working a rockin like it.

It was absolutely horrific because it's We've been four people sitting in a smart, small apartment in San Francisco and the idea of building hydred devices that take biometric data and enroll theomagic globally was a horrific idea back then. One because it's very complicated expensive, And then yeah.

I imagine pitching that one to VCS would be kind of tricky.

Right, Oh, it was, it was. It was horrific.

It was in the middle of it was also like, I mean rock kind is also a crypto project, and well I want to ask you. Yeah, we started like in the middle of a bear market. So I remember back then when we talked the first syvestors, They're like, okay, like other than etheroreum or bridcoin, nothing will exist, Like all of this nonsense. What do you talk about AI? Also, no one cares about that. Also like what are you even doing?

So?

But again, so neither me or anyone else was really excited about building a hyder device. But really we spent almost a year doing research in pretty much everything you could do to solve the problem, right, and solving the problem is okay, issuing a privacy preserving identity that works globally, not only in the United States, not only in Europe. What do we have to do? And there's basically like

And the second and then the third.

Is biometrics and everything that surrounds that whole field. And within biometrics, we then build prototypes for pretty much everything you could imagine. We build palm scanners, we build kind of a phase ID like implementation of it, we build fingerprint scanners, all these things. But the short of it is to solve this D duplication problem. So this uniqueness check, you need a lot of entropy, so information about each user. If you don't have that, your error rate explodes exponentially.

So face does work.

Same is true for fingerprints, and the only thing that really works is and is proven to work as harvest recognition.

So that's why we ended up there.

And then even with an iris recognition, we even had to build our own hardware. We had to build our own lens, which sounds absolutely ridiculous, but we kind of had to build this whole device from the ground up to make that happen.

So much to the why and.

How do we get people are like, how do we think about this whole headline of comfort around this? There's a couple of things. One actually built a privacy preserving system that goes way further than what you're used to, all right, And that's I think really what we did because there's no information about you that you actually reveal by using world coin, and I think.

That's pretty remarkable.

It's definitely countentitive because you're like, okay, we use eyeball scanning and yeah, so this is headline one, headline two, and that's a journey for sure is open sourcing everything, right, So this, I think that's one of the core parts of the crypto ethos is just you don't have to trust, but rather you can verify and we the hardware is completely open source already, the software to meaningful parts, the protocol completely and so everything will be open source in

It actually is way less of a thing than you would think.

So we have now one point seven million users, roughly six hundred thousand of them that use the app on a monthly basis.

I travel the world very frequently.

I talk to a lot of users on the ground and just like try to understand what's kind of what's what's your feeling, what do you what do you understand?

What you not do understand?

And it is very much Yeah, like broadly speakingly speaking, this is way less of a concern, which obviously does not lure our bar but it's the case.

So I have two things on that, and I think they're sort of related. But one why does open source seem to be such a thing an AI in particular? And then secondly, what is the crypto role in this project? Because yeah, you know we mentioned world coin. I can only imagine what it was like pitching two vcs in the midst of crypto bear market saying we want to scan everyone's eyeballs and oh, by the way, there's also like a crypto element to this as well, a token. Why have that component of it?

I mean, at this point I'm actually not an AI expert anymore because I think I'm basically two years out of the field. Went it too crypto, which is an interesting journey also, but as.

Soon you'll be going back into AI probably that's what all the crypto people are doing.

Now right, Well, no.

Joking.

So why is open sourcing such a thing? It is basically around AI specifically. It is that you have a technology that is probably as foundational as electricity, as literally like it's it's still I think, incomprehensible to people. What a big deal this is, right, This is like one of the biggest paradigm shifts in technology that happened ever.

I think within crypto it's the core thesis almost.

And so the crypto element with world coin, as I understand it, is to like insert a degree of I guess community control over that technology. Right, Like there's some talk about the tokens coming with voting rights and things like that.

There are so many things there.

Actually, one is I think crypto, and that's something that is if you're not kind of deeply in the space, that is hard to kind of realize what a big deal is. But it is this idea that tokens build business models for networks almost right, So you don't know, you don't have a company, but rather you have a you have a like let's let's let's say ethereum. Etheroreum is a very powerful protocol, but it has kind of an underlying business model. But it's not that Vitaly gets

You basically find a way how you fund a.

Decentralized operation and can it just let it sustain over time and that is one of the big core things here is you build very like when rol con works, it's really foundational infrastructure. It's I think, without being overconfident, I think it's it is a very big deal because it's a very foundational piece of technology. It just doesn't exist right now. That should not be in the hands off a few people, but rather it should be governed by a wider group of people, and it should actually

That would be so instead of having like a centralized actor who controls the ORB, which is a sentence I didn't think I would say today you have this decentralized group of investors slash stakeholders. Is that how it works?

Yep, got it.

This is like the sparks now like a whole other part of conversation, but basically how it works is so the ORB is an open source heard of advice. Right now, the company that I'm a CEO of Tools for Humanity is the only ones that produce these orbs. But this will change, so you will have, like if you're fast forward two three years in the future, you and I have many companies that produce their implementation of the ORB following the same standards that connect to the work on protocol.

Right, so you basically.

Apple could produce an or theoremically.

Apple, Microsoft, like whatever, they could produce their own ORB, follow their own standards, make it, design it the way they want, but it will connect to the protocol, and that will allow for just a very foundational protocol on the Internet that everyone can use that doesn't break. And the token distributes the governance and also the incentive makingsmus all around the same goal.

So I mean you talked about the importance of like, okay, if this is going to be this foundational infrastructure that everyone uses in some way to verify themselves or whatever, and also is the sort of rails perhaps for some universal basic income that we all need because you know, AI is going to put half of us out of jobs in theory, like okay, it's better be like not just controlled no offense by Alex Blanya and Sam Altman, like that'd be kind of weird. But how do we

So how it works is and that's not it's not a secret. Basically, when you when you verify with with roll coin, go to the flow. So let's say here what roll coin, you're excited about it?

Whatever, you want to sign up? You download an app.

Right now, there's only one app that lets you do that, but soon that also will change. So right now that it is called world app. It's a non constudial wallet. You click verify now, a map pops up, hopefully we're near you. You go to an orb and then you show kr open. Thirty seconds later you receive your world eddy and you also receive world coin on a rolling basis. Every week receive like a small part.

Of world coin. And in that kind of flow.

Because we're in beta, we actually did not launch yet right The launch is something that's going to happen recentaly soon. It's also why we talk right now, why it's a very important moment in time for us. There you had two options, opt in or opt out. Opt out is basically we don't have any data of you. Opt in

This is just.

That the nature of being in beta and developing technology as we go.

So I take the point that you're in beta at the moment. But you know, the arc of recent technological innovation seems to be that people often come up with something with the best of intentions or in order to solve an identified problem, and then it often gets used in the worst possible way. So what's like the terrible

Yep. So we actually have a quite.

In dem for extreme in the company right now in Tools Rehumanity, and we will publish this as we go that just like we tried to come of the worst, weirdest scenarios of like whatever China's attacking the network with billions of the like what could actually happen?

What could go wrong? Right?

So the thing is given seer knowledge proofs separate your walid from the kind of the uniqueness check the only

System, because it's privacy preserving that.

You might actually have it might be bad for you to be verified with roll coin or whatever. Right, So there's like there's some set scenarios here. But I think that's that is pretty much the worst case scenario you're looking at, because otherwise the only like, let's go even to the far extreme, which to be very clear, is not what is the case.

Let's say there would be like a huge database.

Of of of biometric images of all users.

It's not connected to your actual account, so.

You you still have the most there's like multiple players, layers of privacy in between.

But did make sure that nothing really bad is happening there?

Well, I'm gonna get into a slightly macabre arc of this or maybe sci fi angle, but since we're just talking about bad things happening, I'm just gonna go there, which is eyeball theft? Someone cutting out, uh if a really important person who uses world coin to verify themselves on some network, a criminal attacker physically maiming someone like I imagine these these these sort of scenarios are digging up the dead for their eyeballs. Can these must come up

Yeah, they all of these sign ups would not work because the art would realize that you are that person is these eyes are not alive and are not connected to an actual This is the.

Moment on all thoughts when we talk about degenerating eyeball tissue.

But I don't know.

Anything part of discussion.

But no, no, no, I mean I am sure. I'm make sure really like this is like what is a liveness check like? And I guess it goes back to your question of like why eyeballs not thumbprints or why not fingerprints or face ID or your gate or something like talk to us about that verification. Why the eyeball can't be replicated? Why wouldn't work if not attached to a live person? Like these must come up? This would this? What would freak me out?

Sure?

So, so the device has multiple senses in front, there's like a lot of computer on this device. There's like a separate GPU and this seven year old firks that basically at all time run and what a large part of these networks is doing is just to make sure that whatever we see is an actual human being alive, no fraud attack, no kind of weird cases. And then there is in front, there's multiple sensors that make sure

So setting aside the worst case scenarios maybe a slightly easier question, but what is the path to adoption that you see here, because like, there are a lot of things it feels like to overcome. One is the creepiness

Right?

This is kind of the the everything question, Like, of course if I would have the perfect.

Answer to this, I would tweet it out.

But that's a good answer every question we've ever Keep going, So we're worried about being replaced. We don't need that anyway, Sorry, keep gone.

Okay, So there's like there there's a couple different arcs to the response to this question, right. So one is when we launch, there's going to be a token token with a capsule apply that will play a very important role in that kind of the whole evolving nature of this project. And when you sign up, you basically receive on a running basis, you receive ownership in a network through the token, And I think that's exciting for a lot of reasons.

Like one, it's a direct incentive.

It's a direct like you literally get money basically that you could you could sell, or you could do anything with. So it's already like a very small form of It's not basic because there's not enough money, but it's a small form of UBI in some sense, I think that

So and so forth. There just like a little bit of a balancing act. I'm sure it's going to happen.

And once that is the case, once you have like major integrations, then kind of an actual flywheel is starting because as a user you will be able to use a lot of services that you're just not able to use without it. And so that's kind of that's the that's the short of it. And I have a lot more specific specific answers are much more localized as well. So for example, we are in Bonos Aires and so we will work on local integrations in Argentina. So it

Since this is odd lots, I have a really quick question. You know, you built this I'm going to pick it up again because it's really kind of fun the whole or you built this piece of hardware, Yeah, this ORB. Do you have any supply interesting supply chain issues in terms of the optics, so the semiconductors or I mean it's a and how much does a right now cost to build an ORB?

So we had especially during COVID, we had crazy supply chain crunches. So it's like generally, like Elon talked a lot about this in the earlier days, but I definitely also ran into this. It's like you have a perfect running prototype and then it just feels trivial to produce this thing, but it's just not. It was absolutely terrific, Like we had this, We had this prototype, and then building up a production line and really being able to

What was the hardest component to get.

Oh, when it was it was death by a thousand cuts.

It was everything from the computing unit to random capacitors, weird ones that we use. We have like that the actual lens right now is single source supplier, which is something that obviously has to change. But since we customly had to build this lens, there's only one company in the world that builds that lens, so that that was a really tricky one to kind of ramp it up over time. How much does it cost right now? Right

We got to put the THOT to put the ORB into the FEDS inflation basket. We're getting so much better at producing eyeball scanning orbs.

Yes, yes, healthcare and medical care massively inflated, but we can all scan our eyeballs cheaper and cheaper excellent.

Alex Bonya, this was such a fascinating conversation. It's like, I mean, there's like a million more things I could want to ask, and maybe we'll have you back in a year and then in two years when we're all on UBI because we've been put out of work by AI and so, you know, whatever it is. But this was this was far and away our most sort of like futuristic sci fi ish conversation we've ever had not

I take that as a compliment. Thanks for absolutely question.

Yeah, that was really interesting, Tracy.

Are you are you going to get scanned?

You know what?

I think I'm gonna wait a little bit until there's some visible upside for me, which which is kind of that last question that I asked Alex, which you know, I am reasonably I understand the use case of having some sort of like wallet or portable identification that you can take with you across the internet and like various outlets. That kind of makes sense to me, and I think we've spoken about that use case before. However, at this point in time, I don't see a lot of upside.

Yeah, but and to your point though, like or and really or sorry to Alex's point, like, so it's on Twitter, like do they want to integrate the world coin? Yeah, which I don't actually get the impression that, Like I'm it doesn't seem like any of the big networks like are anywhere, like that's on the roadmap of anyone, right.

Well, this is the other thing I'm thinking about, is, uh, you know, part of the world coin use case is this decentralization aspect of it. But what we've seen time and time again throughout history is that the world tends towards middlemen and verification of some sort. So I can imagine a future where maybe you do get your eyeball scanned, but maybe it's not by world coin or decentralized entity.

Well that's the thing, like I used clear, you know, like I already like scanned my ball at the airport, and it's like one hundred dollars. That's a centralized database. I save a few minutes. It's like I've already I could when it comes to privacy, I've already like basically given up. I've already given it all up to save about five minutes in the airline. So I guess I've like, yeah,

Right in the future where you really need world coin, Like the most insidious thing is that you need it because no one has jobs.

That's right, right, Like more than anything else, the scan or whatever, it's this scenario in which, oh, I need to get my UBI from like somewhere, and like they attack sam Altman so that we can all Like that's like the part more than the SCAN or the privacy or the you know, the digging up the dead that freaks me out.

Yeah, I'm telling you a great business model create the problem and the solution. On that happy note, shall we leave it there.

Let's leave it there, all right.

This has been another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Alloway.

And I'm Joe Wisenthal. You can follow me on Twitter at the Stalwart. Follow our guest Alex Blanya, as he said, if he might just tweet it out, he might just tweet out the answer to all of these things. He's at Alex Blana. And follow our producers on Twitter Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Arman and dash Ol Bennett at dashbot.

Yeah, the discord is very fun. You should also stream Bloomberg originals on Apple TV, Samsung Roku. Tune in at ten pm