To understand how much the worries of the tech elite have diverged from the everyday concerns of other people on earth, look no further than Sam Altman's startup that wants to scan the eyeballs of every human.

Previously called Worldcoin and now just called World, the startup makes futuristic eye-scanning orbs that it wants to litter across the lives of everyone, although it is seeing the most uptake in economically disadvantaged countries. The goal, Altman and co-founder Alex Blania say, is to differentiate AI programs from people in the online world.

World argues that facial scans can be faked, documents can be falsified and companies like Altman's OpenAI are making technology that can mimic a person so well that eyeball scans are the only way to verify humanity.

In a warehouse on Folsom Street in San Francisco on Thursday, Altman and Blania bounded onstage to announce a new version of their eyeball scanning orb, which itself looks like a giant, white, unblinking eyeball. A select crowd of a few hundred broke into extended cheers as the two announced their plans to put the orbs in coffee shops, purpose-built store fronts and even deliver them to people's doors "like a pizza."

"The world is going to need a new layer of infrastructure," Altman said Thursday.

The goal, Blania said, is to scan a billion people's eyes in the next few years. Already 15 million people have signed up, with one out of every seven adults in Santiago, Chile, and Lisbon, Portugal, having had their eyeballs scanned. In Buenos Aires, where the company recently opened a storefront scanning shop, that number is one in three.

The company's other scanning shop is in Mexico City, and its delivery plans will roll out in Latin America first.

Economics are important since Worldcoin reportedly works by handing over cryptocurrency after an eye scan. That currency, called Worldcoin and worth around US$2 , lost around 10% of its value immediately after the announcements.

Blania denied the company is directly exchanging crypto for biometric information, although the company said during its presentation that it had already distributed 50 million of its Ethereum-backed coins worldwide.

"We've never exchanged anything for crypto payments," Blania said. Not everyone who gets an eye scan receives the cryptocurrency, he said, and the company says it does not retain personal information, only using it to verify that someone is human.

Asked by a reporter why the company is focusing so heavily on Latin America, Blania denied that was the case.

"In short there is no focus on Latin America," Blania said, pointing to uptake in Lisbon, the capital of the one of the poorest countries in Western Europe.

World's plans have already led to pushback from data regulators all over the globe. In Spain, the company has been ordered to stop operating in all of that country's territory, citing European data protection law and concerns over how the technology collects and processes biometric data.

The company initially ignored Kenyan authorities' orders to stop the eye scans, before authorities there dropped their investigation. South Korean data protection authorities previously fined the company US$1mil . Blania said the company is working with governments like Taiwan to integrate their services into governments' national identity systems, although not to replace it.

The company says its orbs do not store information. Instead, proof of humanity is placed on the blockchain, the same distributed digital ledger that underpins cryptocurrencies like bitcoin.

The company said it is working with the UC Berkeley Center for Responsible, Decentralized Intelligence to store data in a distributed and safe way. The centre confirmed in a statement that it would be once of a number of universities working with World.

An Ecuadorian journalist asked Blania whether he saw a problem with many people in her country having their eyes scanned and then selling the cryptocurrency they receive.

"I don't think that's a problem, I think that's totally OK," Blania said. "We won't do anything about that."

During his presentation, Blania showed images of the company's Mexico City and Buenos Aires scanning shops where users can walk into a panopticon surrounded by a dozen or so white orbs and give up some of a human's most precious personal information.

Another product they announced promises to defeat deepfakes over video calls, which have become a difficult-to-detect scam in recent years.

 - TNS