Alex Blania on Proof of Human and Building World's Identity Network

How do you prove somebody is human? It is a surprisingly hard problem. I think that people are gonna start getting accused of being bots. What we currently see is 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. Like The AIs are really good at programming humans. Much better than humans are at programming AIs. Absolutely. And the AI will be able to have a GitHub account and will be able to post and also attest to five other AI's 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. And those agents are very, very clever. How do you prove you're real? In 1950, Alan 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 Bonya, cofounder and CEO at World, which is building the largest real human network, a proof of human layer for the AI era, alongside a 16 z cofounder and general partner, Ben Horowitz. Alex, welcome to the podcast. Great to have you. Thanks for having me. So Proof of Human is having a moment right now. Why don't you first give a background for people who are unfamiliar? What is the moment that's happening, and how did we get here? Yeah. And what is Proof of Human? Proof of human, as the name suggests, is do you know if you interact with a human or, like, something else on the Internet? And I actually think the kinds of questions that we're 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 wanna split apart. And describe a little bit the difference between just an agent and an agent acting on free behalf of a human. How do you see that distinction? 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. So 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 …