Why Sam Altman Wants to Scan Your Eyeball

The Journal.

The Wall Street Journal

Daily News, Business News, News

4.2 • 5.3K Ratings

🗓️ 9 May 2025

⏱️ 18 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

AI innovator and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sees a big problem on the horizon: As AI becomes more and more intelligent, how can anyone tell the humans from the bots? Altman’s World project thinks it has a solution. WSJ’s Angus Berwick unpacks the plan and explores some of the problems that have cropped up during the rollout. Annie Minoff hosts. Sign up for WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Last week, a new storefront opened in San Francisco.
0:09.2	Our producer Sophie Kodner was there.
0:11.6	And what brought you into the store today?
0:14.0	I heard about this store on news and social media.
0:18.6	It sounded a bit mysterious, and I wanted to find out exactly what's going on.
0:24.6	I'm not sure if I still do know exactly what's going on, but it's an interesting concept from what I could gather.
0:31.9	Nothing sold at this store, and what's actually going on inside sounds pretty sci-fi.
0:39.3	People are getting their eyes,
0:44.5	specifically their irises, scanned by a device called the orb.
0:48.2	What are your impressions of the orb?
0:55.0	You know when you're not ready for the future, but it's now, it's that feeling. It's that feeling. The orbs are metallic spheres about the size of volleyball.
0:59.0	Inside each one, there's a camera taking high-definition pictures of people's eyes.
1:03.0	The goal is to create individualized online IDs for each person,
1:07.0	based on the unique patterns in their eyes.
1:10.0	Did you get your eye scanned?
1:12.1	I did. Yes.
1:13.6	Yes, I did.
1:15.2	Okay, how to go?
1:16.5	Pretty seamless, actually.
1:18.2	It was quick. A minute, two minutes, and I was in.
1:23.8	All this eye scanning is part of a project called World.
1:28.2	It's the brainchild of Sam Altman, the tech visionary and CEO of OpenA.
	...

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