Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. Soon he wants you to scan your eyes via a special device.
Sam Altman can safely be placed in the same league as Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. As CEO of OpenAI, he leads one of the most important tech companies today. Who doesn’t use ChatGPT these days?
But Altman also wants to achieve success with another company. He is the founder of Worldcoin, a company that – as the name suggests – focused on crypto. This did not prove to be a great success, however, as the company is now abandoning the coin and continuing under the name World. It now has very different plans.
Sam Altman has another idea besides ChatGPT
World, the ChatGPT boss’s company, is going to focus on identification technology. And it wants to do that in a unique way: through eye scans. To this end, it has developed a special device that should make it easy to establish your identity through an eye scan.
This new device is called the Orb. It is a biometric eye scanner that should confirm your identity in a special way. The technology used for this is called Deep Face. This quickly evokes associations with the concept of Deep Fake, the technique where AI is used to create fake videos by imitating voices and running them in sync with images.
An identification tool such as the Orb can help combat this type of technology. The latest model from Altman’s company uses Nvidia’s Jetson chipset.
Here’s how the Orb works
The World website explains how Sam Altman’s idea works: “The Orb takes pictures of your eyes and processes them to verify your identity, without the need to store the images or collect any other personal information.”
The photos are stored encrypted on your smartphone, then converted into a code. That code is then stored in a secure database. Users also have the option to delete their data at any time.
From ChatGPT to ‘pizza delivery’
The company is taking an unusual approach to using the Orb. At an event in San Francisco, Sam Altman and co-founder Alex Blania compared it to delivering a pizza. When you need to perform an identification, you can request it, and someone will come by with the device to scan your eye.
Thus, in the future it should become possible to identify yourself in many more locations worldwide. Currently, you can go to special locations to do so. From the Netherlands, the closest location is in Germany, such as Bochum or Cologne. If that is also the place where the ‘pizza delivery guy’ or rather ‘orb delivery guy’ has to come from, that will be quite a journey.