Alex Blania brings World ID to Zoom and Cloudflare to fight deepfakes and authenticate AI agents

Speaker 1: Our next guest is Alex Blanea from world slash tools for humanity, cofounder and CEO, returning to the show for the third time. Alex, how's it going? On the road. What's happening, guys? What's happening?

Speaker 8: Lot is new, you know, currently in LA.

Speaker 1: Are you going to Cloudflare? I think to...

Speaker 8: No. I'm gonna go to Zoomtopia first. There's, the Zoom conference. Cool. And then Zoomtopia. Cloudflare. Nice. Zoomtopia. It's a great name. Great name. And then tonight and then tonight, Nightclove Flare. So...

Speaker 1: Well, we're all over the place with this stretching.

Speaker 2: You guys are good. Production... Audio, video team is getting it dialed in. Yeah. So what are you... Yeah. What's what's the latest?

Speaker 8: What's the latest? You know, so it's a it's a great time to build proof of human Mhmm. As you as you can probably imagine with, like Lots of slob. All the Asians, lots of slob, deep fakes, everything. So I think that's, like, the broad setting. And what happened this week is we launched World for Zoom, especially with, like, financial institutions.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Because a lot of people are doing, like, fake AI generated Zoom characters to spoof people and say, hey, you know, I'm your grandmother, and I need you to send me a gift card, like that type of stuff. A lot of fraud.

Speaker 8: That's right. Okay. But especially for, like, public companies or financial institutions, it's like a big deal. Right? Because if you, you know, if like the... Someone in the finance team of Goldman Sachs Mhmm. Someone is, you know, deep faking them, that... That's like a a really big problem. Yeah. Totally. Potentially, really big big damage. And I just... Like, one of the cool use cases that I didn't think about in the beginning is is OpenExchange. So they're hosting the earnings calls of of, you know, most of the public companies. Yep. And, you know, they will have royalty for that. Because if a public company CEO would be depaked, you would create billions of dollars of damage. Like, that would be really bad. Of course. So that's that's one. The other big one is we announced today that we work on an agent protocol with Cloudflare.

Speaker 1: Okay.

Speaker 8: So that means that...

Speaker 1: That sounds like the exact opposite of what we wanna be doing here. Sounds like we don't wanna give the agents the world ID because then they'll be able to act like humans. Like, the whole point was, like, make sure the agents can never identify as humans?

Speaker 8: No. Actually, not at all. I think we will want to know that an agent is acting on behalf of a human and have human intention. Okay. And so, like, a service can ask these two questions. Like, is that agent acting on behalf of a human? Actually, in fact, you know, on behalf of a unique human for that particular service?

Speaker 1: Okay. And has a human been in the loop with that specific decision, the guy's stake decision? Okay. Like, so it's, like, an important or expensive purchase or stuff like Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I I see this every once in a while. Like, if I'm trying to do something on a third party website, like, there'll be a pop up in ChatGPT, like, put your password in here, and it's, like, passing it along to, like, verify that. You And could imagine that you're, you know, authenticating your ID as you go through. Because a lot of times when I send an agent off to do something, it'll get blocked by bot detection. But if I'm able to say, like, hey. I'm actually behind this. I'm not just a bot network. I'm an individual using an individual agent. Maybe that makes sense. Is that generally the the way you think this parses out?

Speaker 8: Yeah. I I think, you know, like, one of the one of the things that... Sorry. What's okay with my video here. One of the things that that people talk a lot about with agents is, you know, things like restaurant bookings and Yeah. And, you know, even things like ticketing. Yeah. And if you don't have a proof of human, it will just not be possible because all these websites are blocking agents. Sure. And that will be the case for many other things. So, you know, we we think that across the Internet,

Speaker 1: many, services will ask for some version of Approval Human for that. Yeah. So, yeah. Does Proof Human actually change the decision making? Like, there was this story about Charles Schwab turning off. I think JPM did the same thing. They said, like, no agents. We're not gonna let Muse come and, like, deal with stuff here, which I didn't see as a big deal because Plaid already integrates with all these platforms pretty easily. But you could imagine... Like like, does this actually change the calculation for a finance... Like, institution that just announced that, like, we don't want agents running rampant in our infrastructure. Are they, like, accept if they've authenticated with World? Is... Are they gonna update there?

Speaker 8: I mean, we didn't talk to Schwab specifically, but I think that's... I think you will see that across many surfaces that Mhmm. You know, like agents that are not clearly acting on behalf of a human will not be able to access. Sure. But of course, you can have very different rules if you know there's like an actual human intent behind it, and you can you can block that human if if something bad is happening. What are what are the ways of... Like, how are you thinking about the evolution of proving that you're human or, like, are evolving? You guys historically have had the the the orb,

Speaker 2: but are there are there other sort of, like, form factors or or ways in which that you can accomplish this?

Speaker 8: Yeah. So so we are... We have, like, a lighter weight, proof human that we just use the phone for. So that's like a Sure. Gray batch. But that gives you way less assurance but Mhmm. Helps us to scale. For example, for something like Zoom. If you're, like, in a Zoom call with, you know, Ben Horowitz, and Ben Horowitz has a has a... Is actually all verified, but asks you to all verify, then you can do it with your with your phone, and you will see, like, a different Sure. A different batch. Yeah. So we're doing that. But otherwise, we just have to ramp up our distribution a lot. Yeah. I got I got a Google prompt recently that was like,

Speaker 1: open your phone and take a selfie video and turn your head like this. It was kind of face ID adjacent, but just video. And you could see those features sort of starting to roll out more and more as as people wanna verify who's on the other line. And Yeah. Sure. Yeah. I'll I'll break. Right? Because Yeah. But but at the same time, like, the bold case is, like, is, like, look at what Pangram's been able to do. Like, Pangram, I would have thought that, like, text would be certainly not not detectable at this point, three years, four years into the LLM boom by, you know, a very talented founder, but, you know, a small team with a little bit of funding. And Pan Graham's been pretty reliable for a long time. And so I would be optimistic that even even if you have... Even if you're fighting with your hands tied behind your back and you can't do full LIDAR or iris scanning, I would be I would be surprised if you can't do just good deep fake detection with, like, vanilla m p fours. But I don't know. Yeah. I'm I'm much more skeptical than that. You're like, I'm not up for the task.

Speaker 8: It's just...

Speaker 1: You know, that's why that's why you're building the orb and things like that. Yeah. Of course. Course. You want it to be ensemble. We're we're doing we're doing our best. Yeah. Oh, well. Well, good luck. And, yeah, keep us posted. Thanks for coming on and breaking it down. Yeah. Bringing bringing tech to LA. Yeah. Not not not every day. We have multiple It's a bold one. Conferences

Speaker 2: from real tech companies in LA. That's true. That's true. Good stuff. Awesome. Well, sorry sorry for the the scheduling mix up, but but, yeah, great to catch up. And Awesome. Keep it up. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Cheers.

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