YouSaid · the spoken record

Alex Blania

lines on the record: 77
first: 2026-04-02
most recent: 2026-04-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“But to check uniqueness, you need to check against all previous people. So something needs to leave You know, something needs to leave something and be compared to someone else. And that's a much harder challenge and how we approach that is we have multi-party computation. And so that essentially means that in our case when you verify with an orb, we take all these pictures, they get computed on the device, and then they actually get split up in multiple pieces. For example, we take a picture of the iris, we calculate an iris code, then we break that iris code in multiple pieces and send it to multiple computers such that there is no central database in some sort. So no one actually has”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, again, what is different to face ID? Because face ID actually can be very private just because the embedding is stored on the phone. It doesn't have to leave the phone ever. Just because it's just you against you in the past.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A massive effort to just resolve the world. But then also the privacy challenge of like, how could you build such a system that has all the requirements that we care about? And the two main High level ideas on how to solve it where multi party computation and zero knowledge proofs.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An expensive conclusion, it's like very expensive, and then just having this idea that you would need to distribute them all over the world. That just assumes that you would be able to somehow bring up billions of dollars.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“RSID and the Vision Pro. So I think it's, so maybe that's a general point. I think it's going to be become something that we will use across many different devices and will normalize in that sense. But I think on the privacy piece that took us a lot of time because when we decided back then that with our assumptions Which was six years ago that we will need a custom hardware device for biometrics. It was actually quite scary to come to the conclusion because”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was very much untrue. So, actually, I think one point on IRIS that I think people don't appreciate enough, and that's a bet we took back then, but it was essentially that IRIS will turn out to be super normal as a modality just because I think we will all wear AR and VR systems that do that. You know, epilepsy.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interesting And then one of the kind of incorrect criticisms of the approach early was, oh my God, they've got my eyeball. You know, now they somehow have access to my privacy and they're going to do all these things to me. And that's my access. And then they, World Coin can impersonate me and all these kinds of things. But that's not the case. So that was also like a non-trivial engineering problem.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because, like, you can just show a deep pick essentially either through a display or just directly inject it in the camera stream. That's a problem. And so it's going to be a mix off, you know, if you have a new enough, let's say, iPhone or a general phone, then you can just reauthenticate against that picture that you took on verification. Otherwise, you would probably have to even go back to an orb somewhat frequently, let's say a couple of times a year if you just.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think on that side, we've got it handled. On the consumer side, that should then reauthenticate. It turns out to be much harder because you would need to trust the phone in some sense. Because what we actually do in that moment is when you verify with an orb, not only do we check your uniqueness in a fully anonymous and privacy-preserving way, and we should talk about that, but also we send to your phone a signed face image that you then can later use to reauthenticate against it. And with a new iPhone, you can have meaningful amount of trust against that, but with old Android phones basically.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's doing a lot of things to prevent these kinds of attacks. So it's, for example, it has multiple sensors in the electromagnetic spectrum to just make sure that you cannot show a display to it. And it would recognize that.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it is important, I think, to split up the problem and verification, which is essentially In old terms, it's like you're getting your passport. And then authentication, which is you showing your password. Constantly for certain kinds of things. And on the verification piece, we've went down, if you know world, you know that we have built this thing called an orb.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And how do you also then solve the one thing that biometrics have been subject to historically is just replay attacks? Okay, I may not have your eyeball, but I've got enough information that I can run a replay attack on you.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ben is trying to sign up, and Ben did not sign up before. And then suddenly it goes from one to one to one to n is the size of your network, essentially, that you're trying to prove that to you. And then you catch us with the math, and you can calculate how much mathematical entropy, like how much information, just information theoretically, do you need to prove that? And it turns out that's a pretty high number because it's an exponential problem. And so then you can just do math and you find out that things like face or even fingerprints or something doesn't work. Then you would basically hit a wall after tens of millions of users. Yeah. And so then you end up with something like Iris, which is the muscle of your eye that actually has enough entropy.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If that is close enough, I can use my phone. So that's a one to one embedding to one new embedding. To solve the proof of human problem, you will need to distinguish one new individual from all previous individuals. You need to make sure”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. So, do you want to lock everyone else out? And then there's a long list of other things why we disregard that basically immediately. And then last one is biometrics, which actually immediately gives us this IG reaction. It's like, and it even went further because what is so hard about this problem, as I mentioned in the beginning, is uniqueness. And so just like in very simple words, how you can describe the problem is, well, first of all, for example, what does face ID do? Face ID checks that I'm the same person again using my phone. And so it's a one to one authentication. So there's an embedding start on my phone. It takes a picture of my face, creates a new picture, compares suitable deprives one.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You could hypothetically set up a system that maybe preserves it, but it's very hard to do. And then the second thing is also Government identity system is just not built for that. And what is so hard about this problem is it's going to be a global problem. And so it doesn't really matter if one government maybe has the perfect infrastructure. For example, Singapore is like an example of a government that has perfect infrastructure all around. But that barely doesn't matter because, for example, I don't know, Meta is a global product with 3 billion users and with a lot of other countries. Yes.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're there. Yeah, exactly. So, NAI will be able to have a GitHub account and we'll be able to post and own an account and like also attest to five other AIs that these are in fact humans and even though they're not. So there was area number one. Area number two was to just use government IDs for everything, which we just also immediately disregarded for a couple of reasons. One is that I think, you know, it's strictly better if the government would not control such an infrastructure in terms of free speech and actually breaking that apart, but then also”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And also that they would be highly ageentic and just run around and do their own thing. And so that makes it really, really hard because back then when we started the company, there were like roughly three big ideas that people were interested in. One was this idea of web of trust or like related idea. So this idea that you look how someone behaves on the internet or did behave in the past. So like usually a combination of you have these certain number of accounts that you own since a couple years and then you post regularly or you comment regularly to GitHub. These were the kinds of things that people are using. And then let's say all three of us have them and then I attest also that I know you in the real world and I attest to you that I know in the real world and that's how you would build a certain graph. And that was like a very hot idea back then for this. But we disregarded it basically immediately because we assumed that eventually”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's funny we started this company now a couple of years ago before ChatGPT and before all of that, but we kind of took that as an assumption that eventually we will have AIs that pass the Turing test so they can just claim to be a human. You will not be able to tell that anymore on the internet.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. You know, then X or Instagram could decide if that's actually something they want as a platform But that's how you could do it”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. That's how it feels like. And then agent on behalf of human, I think, how that will look like is, I think all of us will have agents. It's unclear how it will look. Is it going to be one or the multiple ones, maybe with different tasks and different even types of characters? And I think it will then come down to, I approve a certain action of my agent. I give him certain rights. So act on my behalf.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That the same person remains in control of the account. And then there was like some secondary properties that I think are good to have. But that actually tells you that the really hard thing is uniqueness. Like what is happening on a platform like Twitter right now is that there's all these accounts, all these bots that are in the replies, that there's probably one human sitting somewhere and setting out 10,000 or hundred thousands of AIs. And there's this catch-up game or Twitter and X are trying to Just find them and block probably millions a day of these”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so quickly explaining just the term proof of human, and I think what is hard about it, and then I'll explain how it fits into an agent on behalf of a human. What proof of human really means is that every individual that interacts on a platform has only one, ideally one account or a limited number of accounts, and stays the owner of that account. Like that's kind of the property that you're looking for. So like you're looking for initial verification that ideally should be something like anonymous or extremely privacy preserving. And then on ongoing authentication.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Prove of human, as the name suggests, is do you know if you interact with a human or something else on the internet? And I actually think the kinds of questions that we are now asking is, are you interacting with a human, an agent on behalf of a human, or just an agent? I think these are like roughly the three areas that we want to split apart.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do you prove you're real? In 1950, Aun Turing proposed a test. If a machine could fool a human into thinking it was also human, it had achieved intelligence. For decades that remained theoretical. Today, AI agents run thousands of social media accounts at once, outperform humans in controlled persuasion tests, and generate hundreds of videos a day that audiences believe are real. The Turing test didn't just get passed. It got commoditized. Every platform built on the assumption that its users are human, now faces a problem no one has solved. Facial recognition fails at scale. Government IDs weren't designed for a global Internet. I speak with Alex Banya, co-founder and CEO at World, which is building the largest real human network, a proof of human layer for the AI era, alongside A16Z co-founder and general Partner Ben Horowitz.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. I will be able to have a GitHub account and will be able to post and also attest to five other AIs that these are in fact humans and even though they're not. Honestly, if you don't take it serious now, then I think you should get a different job or something.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we currently see less than 1% of what it will look like in probably a year or two. The idea that AGI will lead to some very fundamental shift seems obvious.”
2026-04-02 · a16z Podcast · Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source