Sam Altman’s Eyeball-Scanning Crypto Project Has a New Orb and a New Name

Worldcoin is now just World, but nothing about this is getting any simpler.

Oct 19, 2024

Worldcoin, the cryptocurrency / human identity network / UBI project co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, is now known as World. Along with the name change, World introduced an updated version of its eyeball-scanning Orb device which is designed to solve a problem that does not currently exist: authenticating that someone is human “in the age of AI.”

People registered to the system get a World ID that they can use to “securely and anonymously” prove their humanness online, as well as a share of its associated WLD cryptocurrency token.

The new Orb is made with 30 percent fewer parts than its predecessor, which is supposed to make it easier and cheaper to build, and equipped with Nvidia’s robotics and AI platform, Jetson, for some reason. Rich Heley, the chief device officer of Tools for Humanity — the foundation behind the World project — said during an event on Thursday that the simplified design should help achieve the goal of making the Orb widely available.

Read the rest of the story and watch the announcement on The Verge

Marc Andreessen on AI, Geopolitics, and the Regulatory Landscape | Ray Summit

Marc Andresseen is the co-founder of Andressen Horowitz. In this interview, Marc dives deep into how AI will reinvent almost every product category we understand today and has the potential to reshape geopolitics, biology, and defense.

Throughout the chat, Andreessen and Nishihara explore the technical challenges ahead, including the policy landscape, fights to outlaw open source AI, and lessons from Europe's history of technology innovation and regulation.

Former OpenAI Technology Chief Mira Murati to Raise Capital For new AI Startup

Mira Murati, former chief technology officer at OpenAI, is raising funds from venture capitalists for her new AI startup, according to sources familiar with the matter.

The new company aims to build AI products based on proprietary models, said one of the sources who requested anonymity to discuss private matters. It is not clear if Murati will assume the CEO role at the new venture. A representative for Murati declined to comment.

While the talks are in the early stages, Murati's new venture could raise over $100 million given her reputation and the capital needed to train proprietary models, one of the sources said, cautioning that the figures have not been finalized.

Barret Zoph, a prominent researcher who left OpenAI on the same day as Murati in late September, could also get involved in the new venture, the sources added. Zoph did not respond to requests for comment.

Perplexity CEO on 'Internal Knowledge' AI Search, AI Race, and Competition

Aravind Srinivas, Perplexity AI CEO, joins 'Closing Bell' to discuss AI search function, the AI race and competing in search and advertising.

X to Allow Third Parties to Train Their Proprietary AI LLM On Your Posts

X announced back in July that it would use users posts to train X's AI chatbot Grok, but on Wednesday, the social network updated its Privacy Policy to allow third parties to train their AI models on X data, too.

In the third section of the Privacy Policy, X writes that "depending on your settings, or if you decide to share your data, we may share or disclose your information with third parties."

"If you do not opt out, in some instances the recipients of the information may use it for their own independent purposes in addition to those stated in X’s Privacy Policy, including, for example, to train their artificial intelligence models, whether generative or otherwise," the policy reads.

Fireside Chat with Quoc Le, Google DeepMind's Distinguished Scientist

James Cham, Bloomberg Beta's Founding Partner chats with Quoc Le, Google DeepMind's Distinguished Scientist on what's next for Gen AI, at IAC event.

Meta Introduces Spirit LM Open Source Model That Combines Text and Speech

Just in time for Halloween 2024, Meta has unveiled Meta Spirit LM, the company’s first open-source multimodal language model capable of seamlessly integrating text and speech inputs and outputs.

As such, it competes directly with OpenAI’s GPT-4o (also natively multimodal)and other multimodal models such as Hume’s EVI 2, as well as dedicated text-to-speech and speech-to-text offerings such as ElevenLabs.

Designed by Meta’s Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) team, Spirit LM aims to address the limitations of existing AI voice experiences by offering a more expressive and natural-sounding speech generation, while learning tasks across modalities like automatic speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech (TTS), and speech classification.

How to Build a Thriving AI Ecosystem with Lisa Su, CEO of AMD | a16z Studio

High-performance compute is the bedrock of generative AI, and if there’s anyone who knows about high-performance chips, it’s AMD CEO Lisa Su.

In this wide-ranging conversation with a16z Operating Partner Bob Swan—himself formerly CEO of Intel—Lisa lays out her vision for the evolution of compute within the AI ecosystem, touching not only on raw power and the continuation of Moore’s Law, but also how AMD will support “the right compute for each form factor” for a wider ranges of real-world gen AI use cases.

Lisa also shares her perspective on the state of chip manufacturing, how AMD matches their R&D cycles to fast-moving industries, and how partnerships build strong ecosystems.

Thats all for today, however new advancements, investments, and partnerships are happening as you read this. Subscribe today, so you don’t miss any AI related news.