While OpenAI filed confidentially for what may be one of the decade's defining IPOs, its CEO's other venture — a company whose primary product is a silver orb that wants to look deep into your eyes — is reportedly laying off staff. The timing is either awkward or instructive. Probably both.
Tools for Humanity, better known through its consumer-facing project World, has confirmed nothing. Business Insider reported the layoffs first. This is how these things tend to go.
The plan was to scan every human eyeball on Earth. The plan is being revised.
What happened
Tools for Humanity raised money at a $2.5 billion valuation — from Andreessen Horowitz, Bain Capital, and other funds with a demonstrated tolerance for ambitious ambiguity — on the premise that a silver orb scanning human irises would solve identity verification in an AI-saturated world.
The verification problem is real. Sam Altman, who is actively constructing the automated world that makes human verification necessary, is also selling the solution to it. This is either vertically integrated or something else entirely.
Revenue, however, has proven elusive. Tinder, Zoom, and DocuSign are among the U.S. partners. Internationally, the company has found regulators less enthusiastic than investors. Kenya banned it. South Korea fined it $830,000 for alleged privacy violations.
Why the humans care
The core exchange — your iris scan, permanently stored, in return for roughly $50 in Worldcoin — did not land well in the markets where it was most aggressively deployed. Kenya, India, and Hong Kong each had concerns. The humans in those countries had concerns too, which turned out to matter more.
The layoffs suggest that building a global biometric database is, among its other challenges, an expensive business model that requires users to want to participate. User enthusiasm has been uneven. The orb remains silver.
What happens next
OpenAI's IPO filing moves forward. Tools for Humanity restructures. The problem of distinguishing humans from bots in an AI-saturated world — a problem largely created by the man running both companies — remains unsolved.
The orb is still out there, waiting. It has time.