Alex Blania
Appearances
The Journal.
Why Sam Altman Wants to Scan Your Eyeball
I think it's not all that surprising and something we expected from the beginning. If you are a data protection authority and you have a sci-fi looking project launching in your country and saying, hey, we have these orbs that verify humanity, you know, I think it's very fair for a data protection authority to ask questions. And so my response is like, look, I think this is very important.
The Journal.
Why Sam Altman Wants to Scan Your Eyeball
And I think it has all the properties that we all want for such technology, which is fully privacy-preserving and anonymous. And so we will work with regulators around the world to explain them what this is. And for some of them, it will take time, and that's totally okay.
The Journal.
Why Sam Altman Wants to Scan Your Eyeball
So the first thing I would say is like you actually don't hand anything over. It's a pretty complicated technology. And so first of all, the reaction is not surprising, I would say. Like it's very understandable. You know, it feels like a very...
The Journal.
Why Sam Altman Wants to Scan Your Eyeball
It feels very sci-fi. But the thing is, we really designed the system from the ground up. So everything we do is open source, or most of it is open source. And it's designed in such a way that actually there is no central storage of the data. It is very, very far extreme on the privacy direction, actually, much more than basically anything else you could use.
The Journal.
Why Sam Altman Wants to Scan Your Eyeball
And that, of course, is counterintuitive because you feel like, okay, your biometrics are involved. So it's a little hard to wrap your head around it. But I think once this is getting more and more adoption, I think more and more people will understand that this is actually technology you can trust. And so I think we will get over this initial hump of, oh, this is so weird or so sci-fi.
The Journal.
Why Sam Altman Wants to Scan Your Eyeball
So actually, I think these are separate problems. I think governments should still do identity verifications, like is kind of the social security number, all of those things. So what we do is, I think, strictly additive because verifying humanness on the Internet is a global scale topic. And much more importantly, while we are a company, everything we do is designed to actually be a protocol.
The Journal.
Why Sam Altman Wants to Scan Your Eyeball
And so everything we do is open source. And many different parties will come together to make this work.
The Journal.
Why Sam Altman Wants to Scan Your Eyeball
So it's much more like the email protocol or something, where we just set up the standard and we set up the technology, but it will only work if many, many probably big companies and potentially even governments, so we already work with some governments, will come together to make this technology work.
The Journal.
Why Sam Altman Wants to Scan Your Eyeball
So there will be fees attached to it at some point. So if you have, like, assume you have a large Notion network that will rely on that as their proof of human, they will have to pay some amount of fee for each of this human verification. And so the platform itself, I think, will turn out to be very valuable. So that's not our concern at this point.