World

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s unsettling blockchain-based side gig, a startup with the uninspired name “World,” has left us scratching our heads for years.

The startup claims that gazing into its spherical “Orb” iris scanner will solve the problem of “verifying humanness,” a cryptic value proposition most recently adopted by dating platform Tinder.

But considering the company’s latest gaffe, Altman appears to have failed to ponder the orb long enough. In an April 17 announcement, Tools for Humanity — also founded by Sam Altman, and which contributes to the World project — announced it was selling the first tickets to global music sensation Bruno Mars’ upcoming world tour via a new product called Concert Kit.

Unfortunately, there turned out to be a glaring problem: Bruno Mars and his management had no idea about any of it, once again highlighting Altman and his companies’ propensity to distort the truth. In a joint statement to Wired last week, Bruno Mars Management and Live Nation said that the partnership “does not exist” and that Tools for Humanity had never even approached them.

Now, as Vice reports, the startup has updated its website, with a spokesperson confirming that it “does not have any agreement with Bruno Mars to test or feature Concert Kit.”

Worse yet, Tools for Humanity now claims it’s instead partnering with Thirty Seconds to Mars — the rock band of actor Jared Leto, who’s been accused of a startling number of sex crimes.

It’s hard to look past the sheer irony of a company that claims to verify human identity hallucinating a major partnership with a superstar — only to recruit an unrelated music act that also happens to have the word “Mars” in its name. (It’s unclear if the Thirty Seconds to Mars partnership was drawn up before or after the latest gaffe.)

But we’d be remiss not to note that it would be far from the first time Altman has been caught lying, or at least misinterpreting reality to a baffling degree to suit his agenda.

Former OpenAI staffers claim that Altman has fibbed about a great number of things, from hiding non-disparagement agreements employees were forced to sign to mothballing the company’s foundational promise of realizing artificial general intelligence (AGI) that purportedly “benefits all of humanity.”

Altman’s shaky track record was put on full display earlier this month in an extensive investigation by journalists Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz for The New Yorker. According to the piece, Altman has picked up at lengthy reputation at OpenAI and beyond for stretching the truth to — and often beyond — the breaking point.

“Sam exhibits a consistent pattern of,” an internal list obtained by the publication reads, with the first item being: “lying.”

More on Sam: Tinder Scanning Users’ Eyeballs to Prove They Aren’t Creeps

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