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Altman's Crypto Project, Worldcoin, Releases First Major Consumer Product (coindesk.com) 23

An anonymous reader shares a report: In the age of large language models (LLMs) and ChatGPT, AI is poised to make a weird internet even weirder -- turning the content-driven social media apps, news sites and media platforms of today into future uncanny valleys that blur the line between man and machine. As advances in AI make it more difficult to discern bots from humans, Sam Altman, the co-founder of Open AI -- the company behind ChatGPT -- thinks blockchains can help. Altman's crypto project, Worldcoin, rose to prominence last year with a controversial, Silicon Valley vision for a universal basic income (UBI): a crypto token that can be distributed in equal quantity to everyone in the world.

Worldcoin is back again this week with a new launch -- this one poised to be its biggest yet. World App, Worldcoin's crypto wallet, built on the Ethereum sidechain Polygon, is the first product from the elusive identity upstart that anyone, anywhere will be able to download. The new app is one part minimalist crypto wallet, and one part passport for the AI era. It's Worldcoin's biggest swing yet to redefine itself in the eyes of consumers.

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Altman's Crypto Project, Worldcoin, Releases First Major Consumer Product

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  • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Monday May 08, 2023 @09:11AM (#63506325)
    This couldn't be more fishy if he was a Nigerian prince selling patent medicine. Is anyone on earth stupid enough to fall for this collection of nonsensical buzzwards? Why is drek of this scale even being reported on /.. There's not a lot of things beneath the dignity of /., that's a mighty low bar, but, well, here we are.
    • by ls671 ( 1122017 )

      I have to admit it sounded fishy to me too. The only thing I could think of is maybe chatGPT AI style is just the next scheme we will finally find out in a couple years robbed investors who are chasing the hype if they didn't get out soon enough. I mean, if it's ever the case, how could he have made it more obvious than by mentioning blockchain?

      Then again. maybe what he says makes sense, I haven't analyzed it...

      • You add buzz words. Investors aren't smart they're lucky or they inherited money or both. The reason that they don't go out of business is because when you have that much money you can lose money on 80% of your businesses and you make it back on the 20% of successes.

        It's basically the US military doctrine of investment. If you drop enough bombs you're bound to hit something.
        • Startup investing is more like 1 in 10 or 1 in 20 make enough money back to cover the losers. For successful VCs.

          The US military is all about high precision munitions. It's been a long time since we carpet bombed anything.

  • Why should I care? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Monday May 08, 2023 @09:15AM (#63506335) Homepage Journal

    Altman's crypto project, Worldcoin, rose to prominence last year with a controversial, Silicon Valley vision for a universal basic income (UBI): a crypto token that can be distributed in equal quantity to everyone in the world. [...] World App, Worldcoin's crypto wallet, built on the Ethereum sidechain Polygon, is the first product from the elusive identity upstart that anyone, anywhere will be able to download. The new app is one part minimalist crypto wallet, and one part passport for the AI era.

    Unless they are going to give me free Worldcoin, why would I care at all?

    Even if they are going to give me free Worldcoin, why would I care? Who's going to let me use it to pay my rent?

    Get back to us when both things are true, and there's a reason to care.

    • Sounds like Altman is forcing you to care, as the crypto is supposed to double as an identifier to ensure you are a human user. Basically an even more invasive version of a captcha.
      I would be much more concerned about the prospect that such practices may become increasingly common on the web thanks in no small part to the products pushed by Altman. You create/worsen a problem, then sell a fix that arguably only worsens it in the long-term.

      • Sounds like Altman is forcing you to care

        How, exactly, is he forcing anyone to care? It's just another crypto-shill attempting to ignore the fact that cryptocurrency is dead and hoping that somehow he'll find someone - ANYONE - who is unaware of that fact.

        If you miraculously come across some other entity that's bought into this Worldcoin scam, you'd be wise to run in the opposite direction as fast as you can.

        • “Force” might not have been the right word. But he is very much capitalizing on the fear and panic his products bring a la Terminator to get people to buy into this. Even something more mundane like chatbot spam (of which he has helped proliferate greatly) can be spun into a scary tale about how we can’t tell who’s who anymore online, so ergo we to need to buy into what is essentially a surveillance program masquerading as a pyramid scheme to protect ourselves. It’s basically r

  • So, basically, are they offering a solution for the exact problem they created?

    And this, without even acknowledging that all their critics were right all the time, even while they were being attacked for criticizing the overinflated claims of the first wave of marketing?

  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 08, 2023 @09:36AM (#63506383)

    The plan for all cryptocurrencies isn't what they want to make you think it is. It's more sinister than the egalitarian image the crypto boys portray for it.

    After the 2008 financial meltdown, cryptocurrencies were born out of it, declared to be the means by which people could be freed from banks/governments, and promised to avoid any such future meltdowns from happening ever again.

    But the crypto boys watched closely the result of that meltdown, and formulated their plan: create a new form of currency, and for it a new financial system detached from traditional ones (those burdened by "governments and regulations") - they called it "DeFi" for "Decentralized Finance", but its dirty little secret is that it's really "Deregulated Finance".

    Their plan is to make this new money be adopted by the masses, so they start it off with a low price, then gradually increase it, by virtue of them just pulling numbers out of thin air for its value, until it catches the attention of the masses - then it gets more and more "valuable" from the collective faith of its given value ("network effect"), until traditional institutions and the typical "1%" billionaires start to notice and, greedy as they are, want in on the action too.

    So now those that got in at the ground floor have gained all this "value" out of thin air, and once they're ready, they'll pull out all pretty much at once - that it'll create a sell-off panic, and a new meltdown is born! And because of their "De[regulated]Fi" system, the bros have already shifted all the risks away from themselves onto others, so they'll make out like bandits, leaving everyone else to "hodl" the bag.

    But the bros were really observant about that last meltdown - and noticed all the "bailouts" the big banks got - so as they were shifting the risks to others, they increased their investments into what would get the next bailouts - so in the end they'll make out like bandits twice: the first time from suckering everyone else into their pump-and-dump scam, and again once they benefit from the bailouts that'll get handed out.

    And there you have it folks, the real master plan of crypto.

    --
    "Those who fail to accept it will mod the truth down to -1." -Prof. Feynman

  • Sure: give me the crypto and tell me how to immediately convert it in real money. Then I'll believe you.

    What is it with people called Sam in the crypto scam sphere? This one isn't content to fleece you out of your job, he wants to fleece you out of your money too.

    • What is it with people called Sam in the crypto scam sphere?

      Because it's all a scam to start with, but to appear legitimate they just drop the 'c'.

  • Omg this is now a buzzword bingo game and this guy just won!

    He's got block chain, ai, UBI, eyeball scanners, and the killer behind all this?

    He's got funding from that crypto king, FTX's Sam Bankman Fried.

    Holy shit, it's like a trifecta bingo lottery winning of all the dumbest things on the internet rolled up into one giant shit sandwich.

    Where do I sign up?

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