Sam Altman forges ahead with nuclear fusion and his eye-scanning crypto business and, oh yeah, OpenAI

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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman helped bring ChatGPT to the world, which sparked the current AI race involving Microsoft, Google and others. $30 billion.

But he’s busy with other businesses that could be just as disruptive and which, in his mind, are related in some ways. This week, Microsoft announced a purchase agreement with Helion Energy, a nuclear fusion startup primarily backed by Altman. And Worldcoin, a crypto startup involving eye scans co-founded by Altman in 2019, is poised to secure significant new investment, according to the Financial Times report on Sunday.

Prior to becoming the leader of OpenAIs, Altman served as president of startup accelerator Y Combinator, so it’s not entirely surprising that he’s involved in more than one company. But the sheer ambition of the projects, both alone and collectively, deserves attention.

Microsoft on Wednesday announced a deal in which Helion will supply it with electricity from nuclear fusion by 2028. That’s bold given that no one is generating electricity from fusion yet, and many experts think it will take decades.

During an interview at the Stripe conference last week, Altman said the public should be excited about startup developments and linked Helion to artificial intelligence.

If you really want to create the biggest, most capable super-intelligent system possible, you need vast amounts of energy, he explained. And if you have an AI that can help you go faster and do better materials science, you can probably get to fusion a little faster too.

He acknowledged the difficult economics of nuclear fusion, but added, I think we’ll probably get the hang of it.

He added: And we will probably come to a world where, in addition to the cost of intelligence dropping dramatically, the cost of energy also dropping dramatically. And if those two things happen at the same time, I would say they’re the two most important inputs in the whole economy right now, we’re getting to a very different place.

Worldcoin, still in beta but aiming to launch in the first half of this year, is somehow no less ambitious, as Fortune reported in March. If AI takes our jobs away from us and governments decide a universal basic income is needed, Worldcoin wants to be the delivery mechanism for those payments. If all goes as planned, it will be bigger than Bitcoin and approved by regulators around the world.

It might be a long way off if that happened, but in the meantime, the startup might have found a faster path to monetization with World ID, a sort of badge you receive after being verified by Worldcoin and a convenient way to prove that you are a human rather than an AI bot when logging into online platforms. The idea is that your World ID would join or replace your usernames and passwords.

The only way to truly prove a human is a human, the Worldcoin team decided, was via an iris scan. This led to a small orb-shaped device that you examine that converts a biometric scan code into proof of personality.

When you are scanned, verified, and onboarded to Worldcoin, you receive 25 proprietary cryptographic tokens, also known as Worldcoins. Well over a million people have already participated, although of course the company is aiming for tens and then hundreds of millions to join after the beta. Understandably, such plans have raised a range of privacy issues, but according to the FT, the company is now in advanced talks to raise around $100m.

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