🧙🏼 Sam Altman's World

Happy Monday, wizards.

If you missed any of my emails last week, check out my weekly Sunday recap from yesterday, which has all the best links in a single, 5-minute post.

Here’s what’s brewing in AI today.

DARIO’S PICKS

1. Sam Altman’s eyeball-scanner is ready for the World — but is the world ready for it?

Worldcoin, the human-identity project co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, has rebranded itself to just World, and introduced an updated version of its eyeball-scanning Orb device which has so far verified 7 million humans worldwide.

Here’s how it works: The Orb is a hardware device that scans peoples’ irises to prove that their human and not AI. Once registered, users receive a World ID, which allows them to securely and anonymously prove their humanness online. They also get a share of the project’s cryptocurrency token, WLD.

The updated version of the Orb that was announced during the company’s launch event on Friday is built on the NVIDIA Jetson architecture, with a cheaper and easier-to-produce design — intended to make the device widely available. The plans include making Orbs available for people to purchase or even rent their own devices to verify people in their communities. Starting next year, users will even be able to order the Orb directly to their homes through partners like Rappi (similar to DoorDash in LatAm).

One of the main concerns regarding World is, understandably, the privacy aspect. The company is working on decentralizing the global database of biometrics that they’ll gather, and is facing bans in several places, including Europe and Hong Kong, due to privacy concerns.

‎ Why it matters‎ ‎ Sam Altman is creating a solution to remedy, or control, one of the critical challenges emerging from the technology he helped create. Deepfakes are already on the level where, in many cases, it’s difficult for regular people to tell real from AI-generated.

A timely question: should a universal identify-proof like this even be the responsibility of a private enterprise, let alone one that is co-owned by the most prominent person in AI development?

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DARIO’S PICKS

2. Four real-world use cases of AI in data & analytics

I’m continuing my exploration on how AI is being used across industries.

Here’s some recent examples on how AI is being applied by leading data & analytics companies:

• Ipsos used Gemini 1.5 Pro and Flash to create an internal tool that allows market researchers to pull real-world data from Google Search for analysis. It saves the company time by eliminating time-consuming requests to data-analysts.

• MetaLearner is using Meta's Llama 3.1 to make ERP systems like SAP and Oracle easier to work with. It helps non-technical users retrieve data and do forecasting. Using AI to power functions like data summarization, online search and text-to-SQL, they’re enabling informed decision making without the need for specialized expertise.

• Dun & Bradstreet created an AI search with Google’s Gemini to help customers with complex queries like "Find me all the companies in this area with a high ESG rating". They’ve also built an AI-powered email-generationthat helps sellers create tailored, personalized communications to prospects and customers for its research services.

• BigDataCorp, a data analytics and consulting firm from Brazil, uses Mistral AI models hosted on AWS Bedrock to enable client businesses to dive deeper into their data using natural language.

‎ Why it matters‎ ‎ AI is being leveraged by data insight providers to make data analysis (and it's results) more accessible both internally to non-technical teams and externally to their clients. Querying data, something previously reserved for the SQL-literate, is quickly becoming possible for anyone in the organisation with the help of AI. This shift could potentially allow teams more time to focus on analyzing results and making informed business decisions.

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THAT’S ALL FOLKS!

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