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When Classrooms Fit the System, Not the Student
Historically, the burden of adaptation has fallen on individuals to learn, behave, and fit into predefined structures. AI can redistribute that burden.
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Kevin Weil and Bill Peebles exit OpenAI as company continues to shed ‘side quests’
OpenAI is losing two of the architects of its most ambitious moonshots. Kevin Weil, who led the company’s science research initiative, and Bill Peebles, the researcher behind AI video tool Sora, both announced their departures on Friday. The exits come as OpenAI consolidates around enterprise AI and itsforthcoming “superapp.” The departures follow OpenAI’s decision to cut back on “side quests,” including customer-facing bets like Sora and OpenAI for Science. Sora, which was losing anestimated $1 million per dayin compute costs, wasshut down last month. OpenAI for Science was the internal research group behindPrism, an AI-powered platform that promised to accelerate scientific discovery. It’s being absorbed into “other research teams,” according to Weil’ssocial media postannouncing the news. “It’s been a mind-expanding two years, from Chief Product Officer to joining the research team and starting OpenAI for Science,” Weil wrote. “Accelerating science will be one of the most stunningly positive outcomes of our push to AGI.” The team had a short and bumpy road after its formal announcement in October 2025. Weil deleted a tweet claiming GPT-5 hadsolved 10 previously unsolved Erdősmathematical problems, but that claim fell apart immediately when the mathematician who runs the website erdosproblems.com called it out. Weil’s departure comes a day after his teamreleased GPT-Rosalind, a new model to accelerate life sciences research and drug discovery. In asocial media postannouncing his departure, Peebles credited Sora with igniting a “huge amount of investment in video across the industry,” and argued that the kind of research that produced the video tool requires space away from the company’s mainline roadmap. “Cultivating entropy is the only way for a research lab to thrive long-term,” he wrote. OpenAI is also losing Srinivas Narayanan, its chief technology officer of enterprise applications,Wired reports. Narayanan reportedly announced the news internally that he was leaving to spend more time with family. This article was updated to include the departure of Srinivas Narayanan.
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Sam Altman’s project World looks to scale its human verification empire. First stop: Tinder.
At a trendy venue near the San Francisco pier, Sam Altman’sverification projectWorldcelebrated its next evolution and rapid expansion of its ambitions. And it’s starting with Tinder. Tools for Humanity(TFH), the company behind the World project, announced Friday plans to integrate its verification tech into dating apps, event and concert ticketing systems, business organizations, email, and other arenas of public life. “The world is getting close to very powerful AI, and this is doing a lot of wonderful things,” said Altman, speaking before a packed crowd at The Midway. “We are also heading to a world now where there’s going to be more stuff generated by AI than by humans,” he added. “I’m sure many of you [have had moments] where you’re like, ‘Am I interacting with an AI or a person, or how much of each, and how do I know?” World (formerly Worldcoin) distinguishes itself from many of its ID verification peers by offering the ability to verify that a real, living human is using a digital service while still protecting that person’s anonymity. There is some complex cryptographic alchemy behind this (something called “zero-knowledge proof-based authentication”). The upshot: The company is creating what it calls “proof of human” tools, which are mechanisms that can verify human activity in a world rife with AI agents and bots. Its chief tool for verification is a spherical digital reader called the Orb that scans a user’s eyes, converting their iris into a unique and anonymous cryptographic identifier (known as a verified World ID). This can then be used to access World’s services, although users can also access World’s app without one. Altman kept his remarks brief on Friday (TFH’s co-founder and CEO, Alex Blania, was absent due to a last-minute hand surgery, Altman said). He then turned much of the presentation over to World’s chief product officer, Tiago Sada, and his team. Sada explained that World was launching the newest version of its app (the last versionwas launchedat an event in December), along with a plethora of new integrations for its technology. World has been preparing, for some time, to deploy a verification service for dating apps — most notably, Tinder. Last year, Tinder launched aWorld ID pilot programin Japan. That pilot was apparently a success because World announced that Tinder would be launching its verification integration in global markets —including the U.S. The program integrates a World ID emblem into the profiles of users who have gone through its verification processes, thus authenticating them as a real person. World is also courting the entertainment industry by launching a new feature called Concert Kit, where musical artists can reserve a certain number of concert tickets for World ID-verified humans. This is designed to ensure that fans are safe from scalpers who often useautomated ticket-buying botsto scarf up seats. Concert Kit is compatible with major ticketing systems, including Ticketmaster and Eventbrite, and the company is promoting it via partnerships with 30 Seconds to Mars and Bruno Mars — both of whom plan to use it for their upcoming tours. The event was full of many other announcements, including some aimed at businesses. AZoom/World ID verification integrationseeks to battle a supposed deepfake threat to business calls, and a Docusign partnership is designed to ensure signatures come from authentic users. The company is also working on a number of features in anticipation of the Wild West of the agentic web, including one called “agent delegation,” in which a person can delegate their World ID to an agent to carry out online activities on their behalf. A partnership with authentication firm Okta has also createda system (currently in beta)that verifies that an agent is acting on behalf of a human. The system is set up so that a World ID can be tied to a specific agent and then, when the agent goes out into the web to operate on that person’s behalf, websites will know a verified person is behind the behavior, said Okta’s chief product officer, Gareth Davies, at the event. So far, it’s beendifficult for World to scale, due largely to the verification process itself. For much of the company’s history, to get its gold standard, you had to travel to one of its offices and have your eyeballs scanned by an Orb — a fairly inconvenient (not to mention weird) experience. However, World has continually made moves to increase the ease and incentive structure for verification. In the past, it offered itscrypto asset, Worldcoin, to some members who signed up and has distributed its Orbs intobig retail chainsso that users can verify themselves while they’re out shopping or getting a coffee. Now the company is announcing that it is significantly expanding its Orb saturation in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. The company also promoted a service where interested users could have World bring an Orb to their location for remote verification. In a conversation with TechCrunch, Sada also shared that World has attempted to solve the scaling problem by creating different tiers of verification. The highest tier is Orb verification, but below that, World has previously offered a mid-level tier, which uses an anonymized scan of an official government ID via the card’s NFC chip. The company also introduced a low-level tier, or what Sada called “low friction”— meaning low effort, I guess, but also “low security” — which involves merely taking a selfie. Selfie Check, which Sada’s team presented during the event, is designed to maintain user privacy. “Selfie is private by design,” said Daniel Shorr, one of TFH’s executives, during the presentation. “That means that we maximize the local processing that’s happening on your device, on your phone, which means that your images are yours.” Selfie verification obviously isn’t new, and fraudsters have longmanaged to spoof it. “Obviously, we do our best, and it’s like one of the best systems that you’ll see for this. But it has limits,” Sada told TechCrunch. Developers looking to integrate World’s services can choose from the three different verification tiers depending on the level of security that’s important to them, he noted.
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Are we tokenmaxxing our way to nowhere?
Loading the player… The gap between AI insiders and everyone elseis widening, and the spending, suspicion, and even new vocabulary are starting to show it. While OpenAI is busy buying up everything fromfinance appstotalk shows, a certain shoe company justrebranded as an AI infrastructure play, and Anthropic unveiled a model it says istoo powerful to release publicly …but apparently not too powerful to demo to Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. Watch as hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane dig into what’s actually being built in AI infrastructure, who’s winning the enterprise battle between OpenAI and Anthropic, and more of the week’s headlines on this episode of TechCrunch’sEquitypodcast. Subscribe to Equity onYouTube,Apple Podcasts,Overcast,Spotifyand all the casts. You also can follow Equity onXandThreads, at @EquityPod.
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