Sam Altman’s Creepy Orb Startup Has Only Scanned 2 Percent of Its Ideal Number of Eyeballs

World, Sam Altman’s weird dystopian project to scan the entire world’s eyeballs and make a profit, is lagging when it comes to scanning eyeballs and making a profit. Formerly called Worldcoin, the startup—which is backed by several major venture capital firms—has, so far, only reached two percent of its overall eyeball-scanning goal (it wants to scan a billion people).

Business Insider notes that, so far, World claims it has scanned about 17.5 million people. Now, I will admit that’s about 17.5 million more people than I would have ever imagined might be interested in Altman’s weird project. Still, the company clearly has a long, long way to go before it can convince a significant chunk of the global population to surrender their face holes to its weird biometric mission.

World is the project of Tools for Humanity, a company co-founded by Altman, who serves as its chairman, and Alex Blania, who serves as its CEO. The idea is that people show up at the company’s offices, where their eyes are scanned by a giant orb that converts their irises into distinct and encrypted digital codes. These codes, a 12,800-digit binary number, then act as the person’s gateway into World’s ecosystem of services, which includes an app store and a native cryptocurrency (Worldcoin). The idea is that World could simultaneously act as an identity verification service and a payment method on an internet that’s flooded by the AI-slop and bots created by Altman’s primary project, OpenAI.

While World would seem to be an obvious privacy hazard, some privacy advocates like encryption expert Matthew Greene have inspected the product and come away impressed by its commitment to keeping data safe. “As you can see, this system appears to avoid some of the more obvious pitfalls of a biometric-based blockchain system,†Greene wrote in a 2023 overview of the company’s product. “This architecture rules out many threats that might lead to your eyeballs being stolen or otherwise needing to be replaced.â€

Our own reporters also tried World out for themselves in 2023 and, while they didn’t find anything glaringly wrong with the company’s offerings, they weren’t super impressed either. Gizmodo reached out to Tools for Humanity to see if it has a timeline for reaching its coveted goal of a billion scans.

The company has suffered from regulatory skepticism in a few countries where it has been rolled out, speaking to the fact that it clearly has its work cut out for it if it wants to unite the globe under the unsettling yoke of its weird eye-scanning system.

How does Tools for Humanity hope to ratchet up the scans? One strategy that the BI piece points to is World’s plan to act as an identity-verification contractor with some of the world’s most widely used apps. Given that identity verification is becoming a much more common part of the online experience, this approach could have potential. The report notes:

…[World] announced a pilot program with Match Group to verify Tinder users in Japan and partnerships with companies like Stripe, Visa, and the gaming company Razer. Reporting in Semafor in June also said that Reddit was in talks with Tools for Humanity to use its verification services.

Still, it seems almost impossible that World would be able to reach its goals if it continues to require people to stand in long lines and physically show up at its offices to get their eyeballs scanned. To truly scale the company’s services, you’d think they would need to make their identification-verification services available via app. The company certainly seems to have plans to expand in some sort of big way—and soon. In September, sources told the New York Post that the company hoped to reach 100 million sign-ups over the next year. All we can say to that is: Good luck!