The Weekly Blip: Friday 28th April 2023

Beyond Re-captchas, Open Source GPT, What's a Good Startup Idea?

In this week’s edition:

• Beyond Fingerprints and Re-captchas

• Open Source ChatGPT

• What is a good startup idea?

Pre-P.S.: I’ve built a little tool this week that allows you to summarise web pages or pdfs:

Beyond Fingerprints and Re-captchas

Fingerprints and Re-captchas (those annoying puzzles you have to solve to get into some websites) no longer provide proof of personhood. Computers can solve re-captchas. Modifying fingerprints through cuts is easy, while imaging them accurately can be difficult, as the ridges and valleys can wear off due to manual labor.

Source: https://worldcoin.org/blog/engineering/humanness-in-the-age-of-ai

Proofing humanness is increasingly becoming a challenge. Using the iris of your eye to prove personhood (e.g. scanning your iris instead of your face or fingerprint to log in to a website) is one potential solution. This raises a lot of privacy questions. There are technological ways - using a trusted device and encryption - whereby people can verify their iris without having to put data on their iris into a public database.

This is where cryptography arises as a key tool to enable privacy with emerging artificial intelligence. Worldcoin, another Sam Altman (OpenAI founder) company. [side note, although apparently Sam Altman does not own equity in OpenAI].

I made a small investment in Worldcoin. I thought the idea was a bit crazy and dystopian, but now that I see how computers can easily fake being humans, possibly Sam Altman and Worldcoin founders had a reasonable idea. Maybe. Article here highly recommended.