[Applause] All right, welcome everyone. We know many people flew in, so it's like a really big deal for us that you are here. This is a big day for us. We started working on this about 5 years ago, and back then we really believed that something like this should exist in an AI future that we all want to live in. And so, not only do we think what we do is critical, we also think it's very, very timely. And that is why one of the main themes of today is about scale and how we can get all the products and services that we built to many, many more people in the next years. But before we talk about the actual products, we wanted to talk a little bit about why we are even here, why we started this, and what is top of mind for us. And with that, Sam, why didn't you talk a little bit about that? Great. Nice to see all of you. So, we started this a long time ago with a belief that at the time seemed very

unusual, uh, which was that AI progress was about to go very rapid, and we thought that if AI happened, if AI fulfilled the dream, uh, and we still have a long way to go, but we've made a lot of progress since then. It was going to be the most powerful tool that humans had yet created. It would change the economy, it would change society in all sorts of ways, and the thing that we hoped for the most with AI, and the things we wanted to build around AI, is that AI would really accelerate people. This idea that AI was a tool that people would use, not an entity on its own, and that people were going to be able to do things in the world that they just couldn't have done before. And we started thinking about the infrastructure that society was going to need if AI really started to happen. You know, what does it take to get to this great outcome for the world? We could imagine a world back then, and even more now, with lots of AI tools that let people do far more than they ever could.

before lots of AI agents off doing things, uh, and one thing we thought for sure is that the world was going to need a new layer of infrastructure, um, for this to be able to happen. That you wanted the ability to, uh, verify Humanity. You wanted to know who the people were. You wanted to be able to provide great infrastructure for humans and agents to be sending resources back and forth and doing all sorts of things and communicating with each other. And we thought that maybe, uh, if there were a way to build a new network, that it would be a powerful step forward towards doing this. And so, with that, we came up with a simple plan, and that plan didn't change much since then, and I don't think it will change much going forward. And it had four big steps, that's it. The first one was about building a proof of human system that can be deployed globally. It is fully Anonymous. Then, Second, Use that infrastructure to launch a digital token by giving ownership and it to eventually every human and use that to get the the

network to critical scale, then third, continuously scale and decentralize the network to then eventually among many other great things that we hope this network will do, use it to make the benefits of AI accessible to everyone. And so we did one, we developed World ID, which we think is that proof of human on internet scale. We launched a token last July, which brought us to step number two. And so currently, we are at three, and that means that a big, big focus of what we do is the continuous scale and decentralization of the network. Currently, every two seconds, someone new is joining the network. We are at 15 million total users, 7 million of which verified with an orb. And one other thing that we really care about is the density of the network because we think that makes it useful for developers and us to build products that are actually critical and useful to people. We are now at one out of seven in Santiago and Lisbon, just two examples, and even one out of three of adults in Buenos Aires, Argentina, that are verified.

and so, while this is exciting and kind of something to be proud of from where we came from, this is, of course, just a bare beginning, just like truly the super early beginnings of what we're trying to do. Because the mission here is to truly bring the service to every human, and the first step of the plan talked about proof of human. Five years ago, this sounded like this abstract thing because L and touring actually don't work; they just break for one reason or the other. You could think about using phone cameras, you could think about potentially using government IDs, maybe using face ID; none of those actually work. And given we really care about this problem, and we think it's critical to achieve our UL mission, we took it very seriously, and we came to this like super, super painful realization very early in the project that we will likely have to distribute physical hardware around the world. And not only that, we have to open it up to so many other companies, many other parties, can join us in building these devices, and probably like many different

shapes probably integrated in the hardware devices that already exist or you already use. But this is very likely what will need to happen because the current infrastructure, the current systems that are out there, just don't work for that particular problem. And that's why we built the orb, which is as secure as well as an anonymous way to solve that proof of human problem at a global scale. And today we will talk about the next generation of the orb, something we worked on really hard for quite a while, and I'm really excited about. So here it is, here's the new orb [Applause]. So besides being just incredibly beautiful, it was designed from the ground up with scale in mind. The entire software stack was completely rewritten for all orbs to enable verifications three times faster than before. The new orb was designed with 30% fewer parts, and it enables us to assemble them at twice the speed. Initially, we're tripling the production capacity of the orb with plans to increase that even further with new assembly partners and locations around

the world we're making progress towards the ultimate goal of decentralized orb manufacturing. The latest orb is built with the Nvidia Jetson architecture, which has five times the AI performance over the previous generation. It's capable of 100 trillion operations per second, so this enables the new orb to execute sophisticated AI models that prove humanness and operate entirely on device and even faster than before. The new orb was built with more transparency and the ability to audit the code that's running on it. It has a fully removable SD card that contains all the operating instructions, so anyone can compare those instructions on the SD card versus our published source code. But to provide access to every human, we need more orbs, lots more orbs, probably on the order of a thousand times more orbs than we have today. Not only more orbs, but more orbs in more places. And I want to talk about a few ways we're going to achieve that today. Firstly, we'll continue to expand our operations into even more countries than we're in today. I'm excited to share the flagship

locations with you today. Also, these are premium verification experiences. We have staff there available to answer any questions people have. We've opened our first two flagship locations in Buenos Aires and Mexico City just a couple of weeks ago. This is our Mexico City location that opened just a few weeks back. I think they really look amazing. Next, we're expanding access to orbs through self-serve verifications. Think of these as orbs inside existing retail locations, so your neighborhood convenience store or local coffee shop like you see behind me. These enable people to both discover the project through seeing an orb in a retail environment or specifically going to that retail store with the intent to verify with an orb. These partnerships are key to scaling the orb locations and getting more distributed in a region. They're providing access to even more people than we do today. And if you don't want to go find an orb, that's okay. So starting today, we're announcing a new feature called orb on demand. This will enable anyone with the touch of a button to

request an orb come to them, much like a pizza you would have delivered to your apartment. You can push a button, it shows up at your door, and that driver then leaves the food behind. And I'm incredibly excited to announce a brand new partnership with Rappi, the number one delivery service in Latin America. They're integrating with our app, and they'll use their existing delivery fleet to bring orbs to anyone who wants to verify whenever they want to. And lastly, I want to talk about a new type of operator we're starting today called Community operators. So anyone can rent or buy the new orb to verify anyone in their community. We'll have a website up, you can place your pre-order, and starting in the spring of 2025, it'll be delivered to you. In fact, I want all of you guys here today to be our first Community operators. Everyone here will get an orb. [Applause]

Sam Altman's World Reveals New Eye-Scanning Orb

CNET is the premier destination for explaining and navigating the changing world around us. Through news, product reviews, price comparisons, and more, we’ll tell you what’s new in the parts of modern life that increasingly matter more — from health, home, and money to tech, culture, and climate — and how to get the most out of them.