Sam Altman’s Answer to Bots

0:28I think we have some big news today. We like to go after controversial spaces. Biometrics has also perked some ears up. What are the biggest misconceptions? The biggest one is of course around privacy. What's so counterintuitive about what we're doing here is that we have designed a system that can be fundamentally anonymous and is fundamentally anonymous and privacy-deserving. And biometrics, I think, is the only way to actually solve the problem. Platforms like X will not be usable if they don't come up with completely new technical solutions. How are you gonna combat the bots? It's not about combating the bots because that will be a lost cause, but rather every human on these platforms will need some version of a proof of human and actually prove that their content is authentic.

1:10And then we will have all the rest. The goal of this is to create the largest real human network on the internet because we think that will actually really matter. Because I think 99.9 % or something of all internet traffic will be AI driven.

1:24Alex Blania, welcome to Sorcery. Thank you for having me. So for people who don't know what world is, what is world and what is the full stack that you're building? Yeah, so it is the real human network. That's kind of how we were talking about it. So we're trying to imagine what real humans on the internet will need. And so it starts with a proof of human. And so these are actually the devices that do that. But the simple problem statement is that, as I mentioned before, AI has passed the Turing test and it can look like a human, it can talk like a human on the internet. And so we will need a proof of human for every place that we interact with other people.

2:08And that turns out to be a quite challenging problem. It needs to be privacy-preserving, it needs to be able to work in every country. So there's many things around that that we had to solve. And, you know, I think we came up with probably current technology, one of the best, the best ways to do that. So that's part one. And then we always had this idea that like once we have a group of humans, we can use that to bootstrap a financial network on top of that. And so we are working a lot on how to make kind of the crypto stack useful to everyday people. And so now we actually we have the largest wallet in the world in terms of users.

2:47and we have a lot of people that use it every day. And so that's super exciting. So you have WorldID, you have WorldChain, which is the blockchain that everything is running on top of, and we have WorldApp that makes all of that useful for people. And WorldID specifically, I think you will see integrated with many of the large platforms that you're already using today in the coming months, maybe, if we're good. And yeah. So like Merge, or I guess like World and Merge, you like to go after somewhat of controversial spaces. And so biometrics has also perked some ears up. What are the biggest misconceptions that you're constantly facing?

3:34Well, I mean, the biggest one is, of course, around privacy. And I think what's so counterintuitive about what we're doing here is that we have designed a system that can be fundamentally anonymous and is fundamentally anonymous and privacy-preserving. And biometrics, I think, is the only way to actually solve the problem. And I would need to go much deeper into why it is, but I think it is the only way to solve the proof of human problem on the internet. But the cool thing is with cryptography and and, you know, all the advancements that happened there over the last couple years, you can build it fully anonymous and privacy-preserving.

4:05But I think that's like by far the biggest misconception. But there's like other things around like, do we do, Do we collect data? And is that our business model? And that's basically just all wrong. The business model is, you know, we think that this is a network. So it has very strong network effects. And so we are very confident that if this keeps growing and keeps scaling and many platforms start integrating it, this will be very, very valuable. And we will be able to charge fees on the network and things like that. But it's not the data of users, obviously. So that's another big misconception.

4:44Yeah, probably top two. So we're just coming off unwrapped and you have released some new features and products to the world with World. Can you share some of those highlights? What are you most excited about? Sure. So it was like very world app focused. So, you know, just taking a step back. The goal of this is to create the largest real human network on the internet because we think that that will actually really matter. Meaning with the current AI progress and with everything that is happening, having some sense of real human interaction in every sense, like financially, socially, etc. will turn out to be like a really, really big deal.

5:30Much more than it seems today, because I think like 99.9 % or something of all internet traffic will be AI driven. And so that's the high level. But we are working on WorldApp, which is, so we're working on this network and we'll talk more about that. But WorldApp is our client for the network that we were building and we're just like trying to showcase how this network will be useful so the network is a decentralized protocol that we are working on we're trying to share with the world world app is actually our product our tools for humanity we're currently tools for humanity company office and that's our product we're working on um and what we released uh many new financial features uh so you know paying with world card many new stable coin integrations like they've seen all the countries that we are operating with a lot of users we have now 40 million users around the world and so we're trying to support different countries different currencies that was a big one we released world chat which is actually bringing all those things together so it's a kind of a chat within world app and we have been super obsessed about the cryptography and the privacy side of that so it's it's extremely private but it also allows you to use all the other features of the network so the financial side some of welcome world ID features so you can you can use deep face what we call that so you can actually verify profile pictures of each other and you know and much more so these were two of the big one we actually showcased the tinder integration which was really funny uh at least on stage um so meaning like within tinder and right now in tinder japan it's already live you can prove both that you are in fact a real human you will be able to prove that these are authentic profile pictures that you're using and you can prove your age so all things that like really really matter to make this authentic dating experience.

7:48And you will see much more of that. So you will see like many big platforms integrating many of these different primitives that we're talking about. Somehow every week right now feels like Christmas. Like there's like so much cool stuff and I'm really, really excited about the company. And I think the team is crushing it. But I think the really, really cool stuff will come in Q1. And we're already working on that. So I'm always one step over in the future. So the event was awesome. I think the team crushed it. I think the product was super cool. But, you know, since tomorrow, it was even cooler.

8:21You've also hit some really big growth numbers. Do you want to share some of those? Yeah. You know, there's always two sides to that. We're like, on the one hand, we did. On the other side, we picked much bigger ones. And, you know, we were aiming much higher. So we're now, I think, 37 million users total. 17 million which are verified so they used one of these orbs and yeah there was like a lot of growth this year for that purpose but the mission is to really get to everyone and so everything below hundreds of millions is not doesn't mean much to us in some sense sorcery is brought to you by brex the financial stack trusted by more than 30 000 companies including one in three venture-backed startups in the U.S.

9:10Nearly 40 % of startups fail because they run out of cash. Rex is literally built to help founders avoid that. Unlike traditional banks that let your money sit idle, chipping away at it with fees, Rex's designs help you spend smarter and move faster. Their all-in-one solution combines checking, treasury, and FDIC protection into one powerful account. You can send and receive money globally at lightning speeds, get 20 times the standard FDIC coverage through their partner banks and even high yield from day one. With same day and even same hour liquidity, access your funds anytime. Companies like Scale AI, DoorDash, Service Titan, HIMSS, Anthropic, Flexport, Robinhood, and Plaid trust and use Brex.

9:55Start today at brex.com slash sorcery. That's B-R-E-X dot com slash sorcery. Turing is training the next generation of AI with tasks that require real expertise and real world judgment. That's why companies like NVIDIA, Anthropic, Salesforce and Gemini partner with Turing. Turing builds realistic reinforcement learning environments and data systems based on real operational traces. The kind of infrastructure Frontier Labs need to train superintelligence. Visit Turing.com slash S-O-U-R-C-E-R-Y. Yeah. I remember highlights from the presentation were hitting 16 % APY on up to$1 ,000 in your account.

10:41That's insane. It is. Yeah, people go nuts over that. Two billion mini app users. Yep. That's pretty crazy. Uses, not users. Uses. Yes. Uses. Big difference. Two billion users would be a lot. Yeah, see, then I would be happy. Soon. Yeah, soon. that's right mini apps was a big one yeah and then the chat encryption I thought was really cool I was talking to Shane Mack after and he was telling me about the rigorous integration process that he had to go through in order to make sure that the chat was encrypted and will be encrypted for 10 plus years so no one's leaking any information and he had to prove solving Shores algorithm or something crazy like that yeah is this a typical process you put everyone through test their quantum skills well so we have like one of our core so we have values and we have operating principles and one of the operating principles is fail safe privacy because um in some like that that's the only way you could kill this company in in a in a second like if like one engineer is doing something stupid and we would uh leak user privacy basically in any form or shape, that would be so harmful to the project.

11:59And so we are obsessed about privacy. And we have a very, very technical team. We have many cryptographers that are excited to be here. So I think we are on the very far extreme end on that dimension. Between all that, what are the verticals you're most excited about for proof of human um so i think like just generally speaking my mental model of this is that i think ai passed the turing test meaning it you know it can it can talk to us on the internet it cannot generate videos it can do everything that we can do and it probably can soon do it much better than we can do it and so what that i think means is that truly every place on the where humans are currently interacting with each other will start to break without such a technology and you know not just interactions will break but as a result all the platforms that are built on human attraction will break and so first of all that's quite bullish on the road but but second I think the The initial use cases that I think make the most sense for this are obviously social networks,

13:22dating is a big one, gaming is probably going to be a big one, and just like other ones that you don't immediately think of and it's kind of a secondary effect, but like for example, ticketing, things like Ticketmasters and there's a lot of artists that are angry about the fact that there's like bots buying all these tickets. So that's roughly how I think about it. And so I'm trying to spend time on each of these verticals and try to find the biggest integrations and also try to understand what are the things about our product that need to change to make it kind of more useful to them. And so that's like a big, big time spent from my side now.

14:05It's pretty crazy how fast the bots accrue. I remember when Elon first got into Twitter, now X, and he reduced all the bots. It really lowered the amount of traffic on the platform and everything. And then all of a sudden, it is completely picked back up. I have bots following my account all the time. I'm sure there's bots all over Reddit. And then that will affect model research and all that kind of stuff because it's all fake. How are you going to combat the bots? So, good question. I think, first of all, what I think the future will look like is much more of a, we will need to be able to distinguish what is a human and what is an AI.

14:44But I actually think we will probably want to have a lot of bots on our social platforms. We just need to know that these are in fact bots. But once you really have super, super smart AIs and some of them have whatever, a fine-tune in different ways and talk about different things, that I think that's actually going to be quite fun and quite cool and we will like that. But we will need to know that. Am I currently talking to an AI system that is like trying to change my political view, or am I talking to a human that is maybe also in San Francisco? And so like me investing the time talking about San Francisco city policy is actually time well spent.

15:29So that's kind of much more of how I think about the future is that I think it's not about combating the bots because that will be a lost cause, but rather every human on these platforms will need some version of a group of human and actually prove that their content is authentic. And then we will have all the rest on the platforms. So there's that. And then to your point, I think we are at the bare beginning of how all of this is going to look like just because once you have true agentic systems and once you have these very kind of capable agentic systems also be open source things will go like quite exponential so i think we are still very very early on the overall shape of how did it look like so i think my personal prediction I might be wrong with this, but I think platforms like X will not be usable in a matter of months, maximum two years, if they don't come up with completely new technical solutions.

16:41I think what we're doing is very useful for that. Maybe there's other ideas that we are missing. But at least currently, I think it's the best idea that there is. I think a big question a lot of people would love to hear and love to hear about is how you and Sam originally met and then how it evolved to world and then now to merge. We originally met through a long set of random events, I think. So I grew up in Germany and I did a lot of things there. I did these science competitions and stuff like that and started a vertical farming company back then, but nothing really kind of big or something that actually...

17:24But then I went into science. So I studied industrial engineering and physics. And then within physics, theoretical physics. And within theoretical physics, I got quite lucky because kind of next to my university, there was a Max Planck Institute. And that just recently opened. Max Planck in Germany is like one of the best research institutions. and the director for theoretical physics at the institute started working on deep learning and how you can apply deep learning to all kinds of physical questions but mostly quantum quantum systems quantum systems are you know very very hard to calculate especially if they're at scale and there's so many interesting questions that come with that so I started working on that topic and then i went to caltech in los angeles and continued my research there and in parallel actually i i i applied to yc120 which was this conference that sam hosted i think just once and the idea was 100 of the smartest students in the world would meet 20 top industry people or stuff like that and you had to record a one minute video uh application video i did that i got declined and i was like super angry at that and so i i actually wanted to fly there and tell them that but i you know they were quite diligent about not sharing the address to protect against people like myself i assume i was never in the us before nor ever uh silicon valley although i actually like I always wanted to come here.

19:10Why? How did you get exposed to it growing up in Germany? So I have this whole story about how I think how important that is and how people in Silicon Valley always underestimate how important it is that Silicon Valley has this centralizing force on talent. But I think the main thing I can remember is while I was super young for the purpose of that discussion, 11, 12, maybe. maybe even slightly younger than that, there was an article. It was the title page of their Spiegel, which is like one of the largest German newspapers. And it was talking about Silicon Valley. And I was like, you know, I was obsessed with technology.

19:57I was like reading all these like technology books. My dad was the opposite of that. My dad was like an economist. And he always made technology sound like, you know, not that serious and you should do more serious things. But in that story, they were talking about this idea that there's Silicon Valley and there's all these people, all these technologists, they come together and they work on things they think will change the future. Well, the story itself was actually very cynical. I was too young to really realize that. But their Spiegel is like a little bit anti-tech. So it was like the underlying tone of the story was just making fun of Silicon Valley and like how funny it is that all these people think that they're like, they can actually change the world of tech but i read this and i was like this is awesome i i want to go there and so basically since from from that time on i i knew i would go to second valley one day and told my parents told my friends everyone made fun of it but that was kind of clear and then through ic and everything you got exposed to sam you became working yeah well and then yeah right and then like in high school i watched all these yc videos and the interviews from we know and all that stuff.

21:04So I was on Twitter and all these kinds of things. And then actually what happened is I met Samo Buria, who you might know, a really cool guy. And he was at YC120. I think Samo and Max, who was the other co-founder of World back then, were connected. And somehow that's how it came up. And so then I got an email from Max and Sam about RollCoin. There's like a two-pager that both of them wrote. So like both of them already were working on the project for like six or seven months. And yeah, then I had many interviews with Max. And then I met Sam for an interview. And we kind of hit it off. It was actually like a multi-month process.

21:53And I, you know, the idea didn't make much sense to me initially. and so locked myself in the Caltech library and tried to make sense of it. Still didn't make much sense. So there was like many ups and downs. Almost declined the offer. I kind of already did. And then, but somehow we figured it out. And then I think, you know, now Sam and I have worked together for, what is it, six years? It's just become better and better friends. And now I think we're pretty close friends and try to work on many things together. And how do you both manage, for him, OpenAI, you for World, well I guess for him, OpenAI and World and all the other projects he's working on, and then for you, World, and then coming into Merge, how do you think you're going to lead these two companies?

22:41So the first question about world and how we work together on that is I think we have a pretty good cadence of we usually try to do it once a week. Sometimes it doesn't work. But I try to send Sam kind of an in-depth update about anything that has happened in a week. And it's usually, you know, it depends on how much time we have in the company. But it's sometimes like very in-depth. It's like 10 pages, you know, all the major slides that happened within a week. And we just talk through everything. And then my, you know, simple internal rule. And the cool thing is actually that like Sam would probably would have been fine either way.

23:21But my simple rule is always like every major decision that I make, Sam should be involved in. So that is about like recruiting, strategy decisions, big spending decisions, etc. He has been super generous with his time on pretty much every important call that we had to do around fundraising or partnerships Integrations all these kind of things. So that's kind of how we're working is Trying to keep him up-to-date on the company operation like once a week and then get him involved in all the big strategic decisions and and work streams which could be Financing partnerships hiring decisions mostly and then for merge honestly i don't know yet i started waking up much earlier um and and like how's your sleep

24:11um i can't i kind of said goodbye to my social and personal life completely i never really had it honestly since the start of the world but like now it's gotten so extreme that i basically don't respond messages anymore um and it's just like 14 hours a day seven days a week all the time Rebecca said, you're not going to make time for yourself until we reach singularity. I don't know the exact quote, but maybe you know. Yeah, I mean, that's the most... So to respond to the Merge question, first of all, I'm not running Merge in that sense. I'm not the CEO of Merge, but rather we are a group of co-founders.

24:48So it's currently, it's really structured like a research lab. It took us, I think, almost one and a half years to form the company. so we really spend a lot of time together and so that's really working but back to my to the singularity question you know like this is like very i just if you take a step back the current moment of time is so crazy to me it's just like this fact that um we are probably in the last innings before super intelligence that means that if you're actually if you are an individual that can make a meaningful impact on how that's going or like you know of course the pessimistic take is you can't make any impact on anything it's just like this is just set on rails and super intelligence is going to happen and and whatever happens after who knows you know but that's that's at least not a decision i made for myself and for my life i think this is like such a like infinitely leveraged moment in time where any any contribution you can make might make actually might make a meaningful impact it might not not at all but it totally might and looking back a couple hundred years we've never had that like you know there was like humans thought about these kinds of problems usually within a lifetime basically nothing happened thank you you've maybe had like one scientific idea across the entire lifetime of a human and much more so like literally nothing happened just you know you were just doing working on the field and you know and like right now it's just a very different moment of time it's it's where every day something new happens every new every every week there's a new big breakthrough and i think that will continue and so like for me personally i just make the decision that right now is not the time to um yeah spend much on the social life for all those things and i think I'm just going to go completely hardcore for the coming years, at least five or so.

26:48I might regret that, but so far it feels good. It's painful, but it just feels important. Quick note before we keep going. I've been investing on Public for a while now, and it's a really solid platform that combines stocks, bonds, options, and crypto with incredible AI tools that let you do things like build a completely custom investable index from a prompt. Right now, Public will give you an uncapped 1 % match when you transfer your portfolio. Check it out at public.com slash sorcery. Public. Investing for those who take it seriously. Paid for by Public Investing. Full disclosures in the description.

27:20Founders ship faster on Deal. Set up payroll for any country in minutes, hire anyone anywhere, and get visas handled fast so you stay focused on scaling. Deal takes care of onboarding, HR, IT, ER, benefits, and compliance so your team can grow without borders. It's why more than 37 ,000 fast-growing companies trust Deal to Move Fast. Visit D-E-E-L dot com slash sorcery. That's D-E-E-L dot com slash S-O-U-R-C-E-R-Y. A lot of, so I asked a couple people about you in preparation of this. Okay. As I usually do. But it's nothing too scary to describe you. There's two words. People say that you're very loyal and you're very futuristic.

28:05and then you also are driven by like a really hard core set of values yep so do you think that's accurate and then what are your values uh i think that's broadly accurate uh i mean futuristic is an interesting one because i think uh we will see if i'm right uh i try to think a lot about the future obviously but i think many many people say if i do i think the interesting question is are you correct with your predictions which is the hard part and who knows like i'm i'm way too young to know that but um i'm loyal to very few people or like the bar is very high i think if i have a close friendship i'm i'm very very loyal and i also just usually usually don't give them up so like i'm quite restrictive on my social circle um and so it's very hard to get in there i guess but but um you know i think that's how friendship should be they should be deep and meaningful and it should last many years and so yeah i would i would probably say that's true like my childhood was not always the easiest in that sense that i you know i was bullied and all these these kinds of things but i think the thing that i discovered for myself when i was around 15 16 is that i could always get forward with discipline and with like being perfectly truthful and so like uh you know a big big thing happened back then where like my best friend died who um you know was like perfect person you could think of honestly uh super honest smart and and that inspired me and so and so like you know from that time on I I have this this long note which is probably at this point it's probably 100 pages but all the things that I believe in and and kind of what are the core values and the principles that I try to live by and so so I'm you know probably erring way further on that than normal people do can you keep on deciding to go after harder and harder things.

30:22Yeah. Why do you think it's important to try to go after hard things? I think that's the, isn't that the purpose of life a little bit? I think it is. Like meaning going after, trying to be the best version of yourself and trying to like take on as much responsibility as you possibly can is how I would probably describe the purpose of life. At least I decided for myself. And so yeah, you will probably keep me, I will keep doing that. I'll just try to do as much as I possibly can, which I think is like going in the general right direction and which I think matters for humanity. And I will try to push myself as hard as I can to do that.

31:03Who are some idols or people that have mentored you along the way that you look up to? You've mentioned Sam a bunch and he's part of your life, but who are some of those people? A couple of ones come to mind. I think like, or at least like people that really inspire me. I will start with the people that I'm in touch with and then the people that just like broadly inspire me. But I think Ben Horowitz, I think is incredible and just like has such a good sense and opinion about management and about like how to think about people and how to think about companies more broadly. And so I think truly incredible.

31:42We know at Kozla, you know, is like he was one of the few people that I you know I was obsessed with when I was pretty young like when I was in high school just because he took these like very very big bets and he was like clearly in the hard tech land which I which I found like super inspiring like them and for those two actually that's still the case like meaning with both of them that I'm not in touch and I think both of them I think are just like super wise and just know a lot of things which is impressive Elon is of course like incredible like he has figured something out that no one else I think has yet so quite inspired by that I don't I don't know him nor but but but yeah so these I think these are the obvious ones.

32:38Well I think we have some big news today. Can you please address the rumors? Which one? You don't know which one? No I don't know which one. I want to talk about Merge Labs. Okay. What happened? What happened? Well I think we're announcing Merge Labs which is a research lab working on bridging artificial and biological intelligence to you know do a lot of things that we think will be important for the future. And yeah, so the we started working on it very recently. I'm really, really excited to have found the most amazing co-founders to pull this off. Who's involved? So it's kind of three camps coming together.

33:21That's kind of how it happened. It was Sam, Sandra and me, three of us working together since many years on Tools for Humanity and other things. Then it's Mikhail Shapiro, who's a professor at Caltech and has been working on BCIs for 20 years. And this, I think, like one of the most brilliant minds in that space. And then it's Samlin Tyson, who we're working on for his neurotech, which was a focused research organization. They were working specifically in ultrasound for neuro, but more broadly speaking, I think they're also just like really, really strong founders. And with this announcement comes funding.

34:03So who did you raise from? A large group of people, but the biggest check was OpenAI. And then many of our friends. Some of the funds that have been involved here, many, many individuals. It's a large-scale seed, but from that perspective, it is a classic seed where you try to bring in all the friends. and people along the way. $250 million seed? $250 million, yeah. Wow, congrats. Thank you. So what is the mission behind Merge and why is now the right time to go after it? The mission more broadly is bridging artificial and biological intelligence to accomplish a lot of things that I think will be super important for the future.

34:48So like agency, experience, freedom of people. And so it is about high bandwidth brain-computer interfaces. and the relevant AI systems that we think will make such BCIs really, really useful. And so the two big statements to make here, on the one hand, it really starts like a research lab, because we think that to get to high bandwidth BCIs that are able to have a lot of coverage and cover large parts of the brain is at this point very much a research question. We are like, you know, we we spent a year looking at everything and we basically left convinced that none of the current approaches will actually get us there.

35:35So that's why it's a research lab. But the long term goal is clearly to build products that people love and want to use and, you know, people like you and me would want to use. So kind of the broader and broader, like if you now look at a 15 year time horizon, I think it's going to be a couple of years of research, then a couple of years of medical applications and like hopefully bringing benefits to a lot of people that really need such a technology and then eventually get into kind of broad consumer applications. And why is now the right time? So first of all, it's a relatively large funding team, as I quickly mentioned, just because in some sense, it was like, we call it like three camps are coming together.