Poor President Trump has had his ickle wickle feelings hurt again, this time by an episode of South Park that reached new heights of government-breaking satire by depicting the current president as a big stupid idiot with a tiny penis. This, implausi

Mario Kart World added an unexpected, interconnected open world where every track exists simultaneously. Both the Grand Prix and the new Knockout Tour mode take advantage of this by including the connecting roads as part of the races. While it’s a lo

DriftingSpirit Member Oct 25, 2017 18,563 They note how they usually start with PC and scale down, but they will be doing it the other way around this time to avoid issues with the console versions. 4:15 for console focus and 60fps 38:50 for the Series S comment  bsigg Member Oct 25, 2017 25,153 [DF] Inside The Witcher 4 Unreal Engine 5 Tech Demo: CD Projekt RED + Epic Deep Dive Interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OplYN2MMI4Q www.resetera.com   Skot Member Oct 30, 2017 645 720p on Series S incoming   Bulby Prophet of Truth Member Oct 29, 2017 6,006 Berlin I think think any series s user will be happy with a beautiful 900p 30fps   Chronos Member Oct 27, 2017 1,249 This better not be a Cyberpunk situation all over again. If they can't get it to work on S, then they may just need to abandon that console. Work out a deal with MS or wait for their next generation.   HellofaMouse Member Oct 27, 2017 8,551 i wonder if this'll come out before the gen is over? good chance itll be a 2077 situation, cross-gen release with a broken ps6 version  logash Member Oct 27, 2017 6,526 This makes sense since they want to have good performance on lower end machines and they mentioned that it was easier to scale up than to scale down. They also mentioned their legacy on PC and how they plan on scaling it up high like they usually do on PC.   KRT Member Aug 7, 2020 247 Series S was a mistake   chris 1515 Member Oct 27, 2017 7,116 Barcelona Spain The game have raytracing GI and reflection it will probably be 30 fps 600p-720p on Xbox Series S.   bitcloudrzr Member May 31, 2018 21,044 Bulby said: I think think any series s user will be happy with a beautiful 900p 30fps Click to expand... Click to shrink...   Yuuber Member Oct 28, 2017 4,540 KRT said: Series S was a mistake Click to expand... Click to shrink... Can we stop with these stupid takes? For all we know it sold as much as Series X, helped several games have better optimization on bigger consoles and it will definitely help optimizing newer games to the Nintendo Switch 2.  MANTRA Member Feb 21, 2024 1,198 No one who cares about 60fps should be buying a Series S, just make it 30fps.   Roytheone Member Oct 25, 2017 6,185 Chronos said: This better not be a Cyberpunk situation all over again. If they can't get it to work on S, then they may just need to abandon that console. Work out a deal with MS or wait for their next generation. Click to expand... Click to shrink... They can just go for 30 fps instead on the Series S. No need for a special deal for that, that's allowed.  Matterhorn Member Feb 6, 2019 254 United States Hoping for a very nice looking 30fps Switch 2 version.   Universal Acclaim Member Oct 5, 2024 2,617 Maybe off topic, but is 30fps target not so important anymore for 2027 industry-leading graphics? GTA is mainly doing it for design/physics/etc. whch is why the game can't be scaled down to 720-900p/60fps?   chris 1515 Member Oct 27, 2017 7,116 Barcelona Spain Matterhorn said: Hoping for a very nice looking 30fps Switch 2 version. Click to expand... Click to shrink... It will be a full port a few years after like The Witcher 3., they don't use software lumen here. I doubt the Switch 2 Raytracing capaclity is high enough to use the same pipeline to produce the Switch 2 version. EDIT: And they probably need to redo all the assets. https://www.reddit.com/r/FortNiteBR/comments/1l4a1o4/fortnite_on_the_switch_2_looks_great_these_low/ Fortnite doesn't use Nanite and Lumen on Switch 2.  Last edited: Yesterday at 4:18 PM bitcloudrzr Member May 31, 2018 21,044 Universal Acclaim said: Maybe off topic, but is 30fps target not so important anymore for 2027 industry-leading graphics? GTA is mainly doing it for design/physics/etc. whch is why the graphics can't be scaled down to 720p/60fps? Click to expand... Click to shrink... Graphics are the part of the game that can be scaled, it is CPU load that is the more difficult part, although devs have actually made cuts in the latter to increase performance mode fps viability. Even with this focus on 60fps performance modes, they are always going to have room to make a higher fidelity 30fps mode. Specifically with UE5 though, performance has been such a disaster all around and Epic seems to be taking it seriously now.   Greywaren Member Jul 16, 2019 13,530 Spain 60 fps target is fantastic, I wish it was the norm.   julia crawford Took the red AND the blue pills Member Oct 27, 2017 40,709 i am very ok with lower fps on the series s, it is far more palatable than severe resolution drops with upscaling artifacts.   Spoit Member Oct 28, 2017 5,599 Chronos said: This better not be a Cyberpunk situation all over again. If they can't get it to work on S, then they may just need to abandon that console. Work out a deal with MS or wait for their next generation. Click to expand... Click to shrink... And yet people keep talking about somehow getting PS6 games to work on the sony portable, which is probably going to be like half as powerful as a PS5, like that won't hold games back   PLASTICA-MAN Member Oct 26, 2017 29,563 chris 1515 said: The game have raytracing GI and reflection it will probably be 30 fps 600p-720p on Xbox Series S. Click to expand... Click to shrink... There is kinda a misconception of how Lumen and the hybrid RT is handled in UE5 titles. AO is also part of the ray traced pipeline through the HW Lumen too. Just shadows are handled separately from the RT system by using VSM which in final look behvae quite like RT shadows in shape, same how FF16 handled the shadows looking like RT ones while it isn't traced. UE5 can still trace shadows if they want to push things even further.  overthewaves Member Sep 30, 2020 1,203 What about the PS5 handheld?   nullpotential Member Jun 24, 2024 87 KRT said: Series S was a mistake Click to expand... Click to shrink... Consoles were a mistake.  GPU Member Oct 10, 2024 1,075 I really dont think Series S/X will be much of a factor by the time this game comes out.   Lashley <<Tag Here>> Member Oct 25, 2017 65,679 Just make series s 480p 30fps   pappacone Member Jan 10, 2020 4,076 Greywaren said: 60 fps target is fantastic, I wish it was the norm. Click to expand... Click to shrink... It pretty much is   Super Studied the Buster Sword Member Jan 29, 2022 13,601 I hope they can pull 60 FPS off in the full game.   Theorry Member Oct 27, 2017 69,045 "target" Uh huh. We know how that is gonna go.  Jakartalado Member Oct 27, 2017 2,818 São Paulo, Brazil Skot said: 720p on Series S incoming Click to expand... Click to shrink... If the PS5 is internally at 720p up to 900p, I seriously doubt that.  Revoltoftheunique Member Jan 23, 2022 2,312 It will be unstable 60fps with lots of stuttering.   defaltoption Plug in a controller and enter the Konami code The Fallen Oct 27, 2017 12,485 Austin KRT said: Series S was a mistake Click to expand... Click to shrink... With that same attitude in this case you could say consoles are the mistake. You on your Series X or PS5 Pro are holding my 5090 back. Not so fun of a take anymore. Thats why its stupid.   Horns Member Dec 7, 2018 3,423 I hope Microsoft drops the requirement for Series S by the time this comes out.   chris 1515 Member Oct 27, 2017 7,116 Barcelona Spain PLASTICA-MAN said: There is kinda a misconception of how Lumen and the hybrid RT is handled in UE5 titles. AO is also part of the ray traced pipeline through the HW Lumen too. Just shadows are handled separately from the RT system by using VSM which in final look behvae quite like RT shadows in shape, same how FF16 handled the shadows looking like RT ones while it isn't traced. UE5 can still trace shadows if they want to push things even further. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Yes indirect shadows are handled by hardware lumen. But at the end ot doesn¡t change my comment. i think the game will be 600´720p at 30 fps on Series S.  bitcloudrzr Member May 31, 2018 21,044 Spoit said: And yet people keep talking about somehow getting PS6 games to work on the sony portable, which is probably going to be like half as powerful as a PS5, like that won't hold games back Click to expand... Click to shrink... Has it been confirmed that Sony is going to have release requirements like the XS?   Commander Shepherd Member Jan 27, 2023 173 Anyone remember when no load screens was talked about for Witcher 3?   chris 1515 Member Oct 27, 2017 7,116 Barcelona Spain No this is probably different than most game are doing it here the main focus is the 60 fps mode and after they can create a balanced(40 fps) and 30 fps mode. This is not the other way around.  stanman Member Feb 13, 2025 235 defaltoption said: With that same attitude in this case you could say consoles are the mistake. You on your Series X or PS5 Pro are holding my 5090 back. Not so fun of a take anymore. Thats why its stupid. Click to expand... Click to shrink... And your mistake is comparing a PC graphics card to a console.  PLASTICA-MAN Member Oct 26, 2017 29,563 chris 1515 said: Yes indirect shadows are handled by hardware lumen. But at the end ot doesn¡t change my comment. i think the game will be 600´720p at 30 fps on Series S. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Yes. I am sure Series S will have HW solution but probably at 30 FPS. that would be a miracle if they achieve 60 FPS.  ArchedThunder Uncle Beerus Member Oct 25, 2017 21,278 chris 1515 said: It will be a full port a few years after like The Witcher 3., they don't use software lumen here. I doubt the Switch 2 Raytracing capaclity is high enough to use the same pipeline to produce the Switch 2 version. EDIT: And they probably need to redo all the assets. https://www.reddit.com/r/FortNiteBR/comments/1l4a1o4/fortnite_on_the_switch_2_looks_great_these_low/ Fortnite doesn't use Nanite and Lumen on Switch 2. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Fortnite not using Lumen or Nanite at launch doesn't mean they can't run well on Switch 2. It's a launch port and they prioritized clean IQ and 60fps. I wouldn't be surprised to see them added later. Also it's not like the ray tracing in a Witcher 3 port has to match PS5, there's a lot of scaling back that can be done with ray tracing without ripping out the kitchen sink. Software lumen is also likely to be an option on P.   jroc74 Member Oct 27, 2017 34,465 Interesting times ahead.... bitcloudrzr said: Has it been confirmed that Sony is going to have release requirements like the XS? Click to expand... Click to shrink... Your know good n well everything about this rumor has been confirmed. /S  Derbel McDillet ▲ Legend ▲ Member Nov 23, 2022 25,250 Chronos said: This better not be a Cyberpunk situation all over again. If they can't get it to work on S, then they may just need to abandon that console. Work out a deal with MS or wait for their next generation. Click to expand... Click to shrink... How does this sound like a Cyberpunk issue? They didn't say they can't get it to work on the S.   defaltoption Plug in a controller and enter the Konami code The Fallen Oct 27, 2017 12,485 Austin stanman said: And your mistake is comparing a PC graphics card to a console. Click to expand... Click to shrink...   reksveks Member May 17, 2022 7,628 Horns said: I hope Microsoft drops the requirement for Series S by the time this comes out. Click to expand... Click to shrink... why? dev can make it 30 fps on series s and 60 fps on series x if needed. if they aren't or don't have to drop it for gta vi, they probably ain't dropping it for tw4.  chris 1515 Member Oct 27, 2017 7,116 Barcelona Spain defaltoption said: With that same attitude in this case you could say consoles are the mistake. You on your Series X or PS5 Pro are holding my 5090 back. Not so fun of a take anymore. Thats why its stupid. Click to expand... Click to shrink... No the consoles won't hold back your 5090 because the game is created with hardware lumen, RT reflection, virtual shadows maps and Nanite plus Nanite vegetation in minds. Maybe Nanite character too in final version? If the game was made with software lumen as the base it would have holding back your 5090... Your PC will have much better IQ, framerate and better raytracing with Megalight(direct raytraced shadows with tons of lighe source) and better raytracing settings in general.  bitcloudrzr Member May 31, 2018 21,044 jroc74 said: Interesting times ahead.... Your know good n well everything about this rumor has been confirmed. /S Click to expand... Click to shrink... Sony is like the opposite of a platform holder "forcing" adoption, for better or worse.   defaltoption Plug in a controller and enter the Konami code The Fallen Oct 27, 2017 12,485 Austin chris 1515 said: No the consoles won't hold back yout 5090 because the game is created with hardware lumen, RT reflection, virtual shadows maps and Nanite plus Nanite vegetation in minds. Maybe Nanite character too in final version? If the game was made with software lumen as the base it would have holding back your 5090... Your PC will have much better IQ, framerate and better raytracing with Megalight(direct raytraced shadows) and better raytracing settings in general. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Exactly, the series s is not a "mistake" or holding any version of the game on console or even PC back, that's what I'm saying to the person I replied to, its stupid to say that.   cursed beef Member Jan 3, 2021 998 Have to imagine MS will lift the Series S parity clause when the next consoles launch. Which will be before/around the time W4 hits, right?   Alvis Saw the truth behind the copied door Member Oct 25, 2017 12,270 EU Chronos said: This better not be a Cyberpunk situation all over again. If they can't get it to work on S, then they may just need to abandon that console. Work out a deal with MS or wait for their next generation. Click to expand... Click to shrink... ? they said that 60 FPS on Series S is challenging, not the act of releasing the game there at all. The game can simply run at 30 FPS on Series S if they can't pull off 60 FPS. Or have a 40 FPS mode in lieu of 60 FPS. The CPU and storage speed differences between last gen and current gen were gigantic. This isn't even remotely close to a comparable situation.  defaltoption Plug in a controller and enter the Konami code The Fallen Oct 27, 2017 12,485 Austin misqoute post   jroc74 Member Oct 27, 2017 34,465 defaltoption said: With that same attitude in this case you could say consoles are the mistake. You on your Series X or PS5 Pro are holding my 5090 back. Not so fun of a take anymore. Thats why its stupid. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Ah yes, clearly 5090 cards are the vast majority of the minimum requirements for PC games. How can anyone say this with a straight face anymore when there are now PC games running on a Steam Deck. At least ppl saying that about the Series S are comparing it to other consoles. That said, it is interesting they are focusing on consoles first, then PC. 

As a former Xbox 360 owner I don’t understand Xbox today – Reader’s Feature GameCentral Published June 15, 2025 1:00am Xbox 360 is coming up to its 20th anniversary (Microsoft) A reader looks back on the Xbox 360 era and is frustrated at how things have evolved since then, with ROG Xbox Ally and the move towards multiformat releases. I though the Xbox Games Showcase on Sunday was pretty good. Like Sony’s State of Play, it was mostly third party games but there was some interesting stuff there and I think overall the vibe was better than from Sony. I liked the look of High On Life 2, There Are No Ghosts At The Grand, and Cronos: The New Dawn the best but there was a lot of potentially cool games – I’d include Keeper, because it looked interestingly weird, but I don’t feel Double Fine are ever very good at gameplay. The biggest news out of the event was the new portable with the terrible name: Asus ROG Xbox Ally. I bet you can just imagine some parent asking that for that at shop at Christmas, to buy their kid? Not that that would ever happen because the thing’s going to be stupidly expensive. It seemed like a distraction, a small experiment at best, and I didn’t really pay much attention to it, especially as I already have a Steam Deck. But then today I read that Microsoft has cancelled its plans for their next gen portable and that actually this ridiculously named non-Xbox device may end up being the future of gaming for Microsoft. I’ve always preferred Xbox as my console as choice, probably because I was always a PC gamer before that. Although now I look back at things I have to admit that I only got the Xbox One out of brand loyalty and I wouldn’t have if I’d been thinking about it more clearly. By that point I was in too deep and so I bought the Xbox Series X/S out of muscle memory more than anything, wasn’t I proven to be a chump? What frustrates me most about Xbox at the moment is how indecisive it seems. I almost didn’t watch the Xbox Games Showcase because I knew I’d have to see Phil Spencer, or one of his goons, grinning into the camera, as if nothing is wrong. And, of course, that’s exactly what he did, ‘hinting’ about the return of Halo, as if everyone was going to be pumping the air to hear about that. Expert, exclusive gaming analysis Sign up to the GameCentral newsletter for a unique take on the week in gaming, alongside the latest reviews and more. Delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning. News flash, Phil: no one cares. You’ve run that series into the ground, like all the other Xbox exclusives, to the point where they just feel old fashioned and tired. Old school fans don’t care and newer ones definitely don’t. It may sell okay at first on PlayStation 5, but only out of curiosity and as a kind of celebration that Sony has finally defeated Microsoft. To all extents and purposes, Xbox is now third party. The only thing that makes them not is that they still make their own console hardware but how long is that going to last? The ROG Ally is made by Asus and if Microsoft don’t make a handheld are they really going to put out a home console instead? That’s going to cost a lot of money in R&D and marketing and everything else, and I don’t know who could argue that it’s got a chance of selling more than the Xbox Series X/S. Phil Spencer has been talking about making a handheld for years and yet suddenly it’s not going to happen? Is there anything that is set in stone? I even heard people talking about them going back to having exclusives with the next generation, if it seemed like things were working out. I loved my Xbox 360, it’s still my favourite console of all time – the perfect balance between modern and retro games – but its golden era is a long time ago now, well over a decade. Xbox at the time was the new kid on the block, full of new ideas and daring to what Sony wouldn’t or couldn’t. When was the last time Xbox did anything like that? Game Pass probably, and that hasn’t worked out at all well. More Trending Nothing has, ever since that disastrous Xbox One reveal, and I just don’t understand how a company with basically infinite resources, and which already owns half the games industry, can be such a hopeless mess. I’m just sticking with PC from now and in the future, I’m going to pretend the Xbox 360 was my one and only console. By reader Cramersauce Xbox One – not a good follow-up to the Xbox 360 (Microsoft) The reader’s features do not necessarily represent the views of GameCentral or Metro. You can submit your own 500 to 600-word reader feature at any time, which if used will be published in the next appropriate weekend slot. Just contact us at gamecentral@metro.co.uk or use our Submit Stuff page and you won’t need to send an email. GameCentral Sign up for exclusive analysis, latest releases, and bonus community content. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Your information will be used in line with our Privacy Policy

I don’t know why, but it continues to astonish me just how foolish politicians can be – and how easily persuaded they are by really bad advice from smart but tin-eared advisers. In less than a year, Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have squandered the gift of the huge majority won at last year’s General Election on one key issue after another: their response to the genocide in Gaza; wantonly cruel cuts in disability benefits; failing to find creative ways of taxing wealth; dealing with the water companies – and, now, on the new Planning and Infrastructure Bill. On 23 May 23, the Wildlife Trusts and the RSPB (with a combined membership of more than 2 million) launched a devastating attack on Labour’s whole approach to streamlining the planning system through the Planning and Infrastructure Bill.Advertisement Part 3 of the bill will make it possible for developers to ignore existing environmental protections by paying money into a so-called ‘Nature Recovery Fund’, which will be used to pay for environmental projects elsewhere. Starmer and Reeves have gone out of their way, time after time, to claim that it’s these environmental safeguards that are responsible for delays and blockages in the planning process, even though they know this is completely untrue. According to the Wildlife Trusts, roughly 3 per cent of proposals for new housing are delayed for environmental reasons. As The Guardian reported: ‘the data from analysis of 17,433 planning appeals in England in 2024 found that newts were relevant in just 140 (0.8%) planning appeals, and bats were relevant in 432 (2.48%).’ ‘They pursue this path even though are no polls to show that this is what matters to Labour voters tempted by Reform’ So what makes Starmer and Reeves both stupid and totally dishonest? By all accounts the rationale of their tin-eared advisers is to demonstrate to ‘Reform-friendly’ Labour voters that the environment is as unsafe in their hands as it would be in Nigel Farage’s. That economic growth is all that matters. That caring for the natural world is a middle-class self-indulgence (‘the well-to-do prioritising the nice-to-have’ over the interests of working people). And that pouring as much concrete as possible is self-evidently the best way of achieving that growth. And they go on pursuing this ideological path even though there are no supporting polls to show that this is what really matters to Labour voters tempted by Reform’s populist bullshit.Advertisement So they lie. They dig in. They break promises left, right and centre, ready to die, apparently, in this self-constructed ditch of developer-led deceit. That’s why every single amendment put forward through the committee examining the bill was summarily dismissed by the loyal but lumpen Labour MPs on the committee. These included an amendment tabled by veteran Labour MP Barry Gardiner requiring all house builders to provide a specially designed brick (costing £35) to help cavity-nesting such as swifts, house martins, sparrows and starlings – a measure that Labour in opposition enthusiastically supported! And there’s huge public support for this one small, cost-effective biodiversity regulation. To get a measure of this government’s subservient obedience to the demands of the volume housebuilders, just listen to the words of housing minister Matthew Pennycook: ‘We are not convinced that legislating to mandate the use of specific wildlife features is the right approach, whether that is done through building regulations or a freestanding legal requirement'. It’s all so demeaning. So unnecessary. And now that the mainstream environment movement, urged on primarily by the Wildlife Trusts, has realised just how high the stakes are with this Planning and Infrastructure Bill, it’s reasonable to assume that there will be a much more serious debate in the House of Lords, bringing down on ministers’ helmeted heads the righteous outrage of the entire movement. As we’ve learnt, in less than one deeply depressing year, this is a government that needs to be kicked harder and harder until they get desperate enough to make the pain go away. P.S. If you want to read a brilliant summary of ‘reasons to be outraged’ (and what to do about it), check out George Monbiot’s take on this. Jonathon Porritt is a campaigner and author and co-founder of Forum for the Future This article first appeared on his blog 2025-06-06 Jonathon Porritt comment and share

Once again, Sam Altman wants to show you the future. The CEO of OpenAI is standing on a sparse stage in San Francisco, preparing to reveal his next move to an attentive crowd. “We needed some way for identifying, authenticating humans in the age of AGI,” Altman explains, referring to artificial general intelligence. “We wanted a way to make sure that humans stayed special and central.” The solution Altman came up with is looming behind him. It’s a white sphere about the size of a beach ball, with a camera at its center. The company that makes it, known as Tools for Humanity, calls this mysterious device the Orb. Stare into the heart of the plastic-and-silicon globe and it will map the unique furrows and ciliary zones of your iris. Seconds later, you’ll receive inviolable proof of your humanity: a 12,800-digit binary number, known as an iris code, sent to an app on your phone. At the same time, a packet of cryptocurrency called Worldcoin, worth approximately $42, will be transferred to your digital wallet—your reward for becoming a “verified human.” Altman co-founded Tools for Humanity in 2019 as part of a suite of companies he believed would reshape the world. Once the tech he was developing at OpenAI passed a certain level of intelligence, he reasoned, it would mark the end of one era on the Internet and the beginning of another, in which AI became so advanced, so human-like, that you would no longer be able to tell whether what you read, saw, or heard online came from a real person. When that happened, Altman imagined, we would need a new kind of online infrastructure: a human-verification layer for the Internet, to distinguish real people from the proliferating number of bots and AI “agents.”And so Tools for Humanity set out to build a global “proof-of-humanity” network. It aims to verify 50 million people by the end of 2025; ultimately its goal is to sign up every single human being on the planet. The free crypto serves as both an incentive for users to sign up, and also an entry point into what the company hopes will become the world’s largest financial network, through which it believes “double-digit percentages of the global economy” will eventually flow. Even for Altman, these missions are audacious. “If this really works, it’s like a fundamental piece of infrastructure for the world,” Altman tells TIME in a video interview from the passenger seat of a car a few days before his April 30 keynote address.Internal hardware of the Orb in mid-assembly in March. Davide Monteleone for TIMEThe project’s goal is to solve a problem partly of Altman’s own making. In the near future, he and other tech leaders say, advanced AIs will be imbued with agency: the ability to not just respond to human prompting, but to take actions independently in the world. This will enable the creation of AI coworkers that can drop into your company and begin solving problems; AI tutors that can adapt their teaching style to students’ preferences; even AI doctors that can diagnose routine cases and handle scheduling or logistics. The arrival of these virtual agents, their venture capitalist backers predict, will turbocharge our productivity and unleash an age of material abundance.But AI agents will also have cascading consequences for the human experience online. “As AI systems become harder to distinguish from people, websites may face difficult trade-offs,” says a recent paper by researchers from 25 different universities, nonprofits, and tech companies, including OpenAI. “There is a significant risk that digital institutions will be unprepared for a time when AI-powered agents, including those leveraged by malicious actors, overwhelm other activity online.” On social-media platforms like X and Facebook, bot-driven accounts are amassing billions of views on AI-generated content. In April, the foundation that runs Wikipedia disclosed that AI bots scraping their site were making the encyclopedia too costly to sustainably run. Later the same month, researchers from the University of Zurich found that AI-generated comments on the subreddit /r/ChangeMyView were up to six times more successful than human-written ones at persuading unknowing users to change their minds.  Photograph by Davide Monteleone for TIMEBuy a copy of the Orb issue hereThe arrival of agents won’t only threaten our ability to distinguish between authentic and AI content online. It will also challenge the Internet’s core business model, online advertising, which relies on the assumption that ads are being viewed by humans. “The Internet will change very drastically sometime in the next 12 to 24 months,” says Tools for Humanity CEO Alex Blania. “So we have to succeed, or I’m not sure what else would happen.”For four years, Blania’s team has been testing the Orb’s hardware abroad. Now the U.S. rollout has arrived. Over the next 12 months, 7,500 Orbs will be arriving in dozens of American cities, in locations like gas stations, bodegas, and flagship stores in Los Angeles, Austin, and Miami. The project’s founders and fans hope the Orb’s U.S. debut will kickstart a new phase of growth. The San Francisco keynote was titled: “At Last.” It’s not clear the public appetite matches the exultant branding. Tools for Humanity has “verified” just 12 million humans since mid 2023, a pace Blania concedes is well behind schedule. Few online platforms currently support the so-called “World ID” that the Orb bestows upon its visitors, leaving little to entice users to give up their biometrics beyond the lure of free crypto. Even Altman isn’t sure whether the whole thing can work. “I can see [how] this becomes a fairly mainstream thing in a few years,” he says. “Or I can see that it’s still only used by a small subset of people who think about the world in a certain way.” Blania (left) and Altman debut the Orb at World’s U.S. launch in San Francisco on April 30, 2025. Jason Henry—The New York Times/ReduxYet as the Internet becomes overrun with AI, the creators of this strange new piece of hardware are betting that everybody in the world will soon want—or need—to visit an Orb. The biometric code it creates, they predict, will become a new type of digital passport, without which you might be denied passage to the Internet of the future, from dating apps to government services. In a best-case scenario, World ID could be a privacy-preserving way to fortify the Internet against an AI-driven deluge of fake or deceptive content. It could also enable the distribution of universal basic income (UBI)—a policy that Altman has previously touted—as AI automation transforms the global economy. To examine what this new technology might mean, I reported from three continents, interviewed 10 Tools for Humanity executives and investors, reviewed hundreds of pages of company documents, and “verified” my own humanity. The Internet will inevitably need some kind of proof-of-humanity system in the near future, says Divya Siddarth, founder of the nonprofit Collective Intelligence Project. The real question, she argues, is whether such a system will be centralized—“a big security nightmare that enables a lot of surveillance”—or privacy-preserving, as the Orb claims to be. Questions remain about Tools for Humanity’s corporate structure, its yoking to an unstable cryptocurrency, and what power it would concentrate in the hands of its owners if successful. Yet it’s also one of the only attempts to solve what many see as an increasingly urgent problem. “There are some issues with it,” Siddarth says of World ID. “But you can’t preserve the Internet in amber. Something in this direction is necessary.”In March, I met Blania at Tools for Humanity’s San Francisco headquarters, where a large screen displays the number of weekly “Orb verifications” by country. A few days earlier, the CEO had attended a $1 million-per-head dinner at Mar-a-Lago with President Donald Trump, whom he credits with clearing the way for the company’s U.S. launch by relaxing crypto regulations. “Given Sam is a very high profile target,” Blania says, “we just decided that we would let other companies fight that fight, and enter the U.S. once the air is clear.” As a kid growing up in Germany, Blania was a little different than his peers. “Other kids were, like, drinking a lot, or doing a lot of parties, and I was just building a lot of things that could potentially blow up,” he recalls. At the California Institute of Technology, where he was pursuing research for a masters degree, he spent many evenings reading the blogs of startup gurus like Paul Graham and Altman. Then, in 2019, Blania received an email from Max Novendstern, an entrepreneur who had been kicking around a concept with Altman to build a global cryptocurrency network. They were looking for technical minds to help with the project. Over cappuccinos, Altman told Blania he was certain about three things. First, smarter-than-human AI was not only possible, but inevitable—and it would soon mean you could no longer assume that anything you read, saw, or heard on the Internet was human-created. Second, cryptocurrency and other decentralized technologies would be a massive force for change in the world. And third, scale was essential to any crypto network’s value. The Orb is tested on a calibration rig, surrounded by checkerboard targets to ensure precision in iris detection. Davide Monteleone for TIMEThe goal of Worldcoin, as the project was initially called, was to combine those three insights. Altman took a lesson from PayPal, the company co-founded by his mentor Peter Thiel. Of its initial funding, PayPal spent less than $10 million actually building its app—but pumped an additional $70 million or so into a referral program, whereby new users and the person who invited them would each receive $10 in credit. The referral program helped make PayPal a leading payment platform. Altman thought a version of that strategy would propel Worldcoin to similar heights. He wanted to create a new cryptocurrency and give it to users as a reward for signing up. The more people who joined the system, the higher the token’s value would theoretically rise. Since 2019, the project has raised $244 million from investors like Coinbase and the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. That money paid for the $50 million cost of designing the Orb, plus maintaining the software it runs on. The total market value of all Worldcoins in existence, however, is far higher—around $12 billion. That number is a bit misleading: most of those coins are not in circulation and Worldcoin’s price has fluctuated wildly. Still, it allows the company to reward users for signing up at no cost to itself. The main lure for investors is the crypto upside. Some 75% of all Worldcoins are set aside for humans to claim when they sign up, or as referral bonuses. The remaining 25% are split between Tools for Humanity’s backers and staff, including Blania and Altman. “I’m really excited to make a lot of money,” ” Blania says.From the beginning, Altman was thinking about the consequences of the AI revolution he intended to unleash. (On May 21, he announced plans to team up with famed former Apple designer Jony Ive on a new AI personal device.) A future in which advanced AI could perform most tasks more effectively than humans would bring a wave of unemployment and economic dislocation, he reasoned. Some kind of wealth redistribution might be necessary. In 2016, he partially funded a study of basic income, which gave $1,000 per-month handouts to low-income individuals in Illinois and Texas. But there was no single financial system that would allow money to be sent to everybody in the world. Nor was there a way to stop an individual human from claiming their share twice—or to identify a sophisticated AI pretending to be human and pocketing some cash of its own. In 2023, Tools for Humanity raised the possibility of using the network to redistribute the profits of AI labs that were able to automate human labor. “As AI advances,” it said, “fairly distributing access and some of the created value through UBI will play an increasingly vital role in counteracting the concentration of economic power.”Blania was taken by the pitch, and agreed to join the project as a co-founder. “Most people told us we were very stupid or crazy or insane, including Silicon Valley investors,” Blania says. At least until ChatGPT came out in 2022, transforming OpenAI into one of the world’s most famous tech companies and kickstarting a market bull-run. “Things suddenly started to make more and more sense to the external world,” Blania says of the vision to develop a global “proof-of-humanity” network. “You have to imagine a world in which you will have very smart and competent systems somehow flying through the Internet with different goals and ideas of what they want to do, and us having no idea anymore what we’re dealing with.”After our interview, Blania’s head of communications ushers me over to a circular wooden structure where eight Orbs face one another. The scene feels like a cross between an Apple Store and a ceremonial altar. “Do you want to get verified?” she asks. Putting aside my reservations for the purposes of research, I download the World App and follow its prompts. I flash a QR code at the Orb, then gaze into it. A minute or so later, my phone buzzes with confirmation: I’ve been issued my own personal World ID and some Worldcoin.The first thing the Orb does is check if you’re human, using a neural network that takes input from various sensors, including an infrared camera and a thermometer. Davide Monteleone for TIMEWhile I stared into the Orb, several complex procedures had taken place at once. A neural network took inputs from multiple sensors—an infrared camera, a thermometer—to confirm I was a living human. Simultaneously, a telephoto lens zoomed in on my iris, capturing the physical traits within that distinguish me from every other human on Earth. It then converted that image into an iris code: a numerical abstraction of my unique biometric data. Then the Orb checked to see if my iris code matched any it had seen before, using a technique allowing encrypted data to be compared without revealing the underlying information. Before the Orb deleted my data, it turned my iris code into several derivative codes—none of which on its own can be linked back to the original—encrypted them, deleted the only copies of the decryption keys, and sent each one to a different secure server, so that future users’ iris codes can be checked for uniqueness against mine. If I were to use my World ID to access a website, that site would learn nothing about me except that I’m human. The Orb is open-source, so outside experts can examine its code and verify the company’s privacy claims. “I did a colonoscopy on this company and these technologies before I agreed to join,” says Trevor Traina, a Trump donor and former U.S. ambassador to Austria who now serves as Tools for Humanity’s chief business officer. “It is the most privacy-preserving technology on the planet.”Only weeks later, when researching what would happen if I wanted to delete my data, do I discover that Tools for Humanity’s privacy claims rest on what feels like a sleight of hand. The company argues that in modifying your iris code, it has “effectively anonymized” your biometric data. If you ask Tools for Humanity to delete your iris codes, they will delete the one stored on your phone, but not the derivatives. Those, they argue, are no longer your personal data at all. But if I were to return to an Orb after deleting my data, it would still recognize those codes as uniquely mine. Once you look into the Orb, a piece of your identity remains in the system forever. If users could truly delete that data, the premise of one ID per human would collapse, Tools for Humanity’s chief privacy officer Damien Kieran tells me when I call seeking an explanation. People could delete and sign up for new World IDs after being suspended from a platform. Or claim their Worldcoin tokens, sell them, delete their data, and cash in again. This argument fell flat with European Union regulators in Germany, who recently declared that the Orb posed “fundamental data protection issues” and ordered the company to allow European users to fully delete even their anonymized data. (Tools for Humanity has appealed; the regulator is now reassessing the decision.) “Just like any other technology service, users cannot delete data that is not personal data,” Kieran said in a statement. “If a person could delete anonymized data that can’t be linked to them by World or any third party, it would allow bad actors to circumvent the security and safety that World ID is working to bring to every human.”On a balmy afternoon this spring, I climb a flight of stairs up to a room above a restaurant in an outer suburb of Seoul. Five elderly South Koreans tap on their phones as they wait to be “verified” by the two Orbs in the center of the room. “We don’t really know how to distinguish between AI and humans anymore,” an attendant in a company t-shirt explains in Korean, gesturing toward the spheres. “We need a way to verify that we’re human and not AI. So how do we do that? Well, humans have irises, but AI doesn’t.”The attendant ushers an elderly woman over to an Orb. It bleeps. “Open your eyes,” a disembodied voice says in English. The woman stares into the camera. Seconds later, she checks her phone and sees that a packet of Worldcoin worth 75,000 Korean won (about $54) has landed in her digital wallet. Congratulations, the app tells her. You are now a verified human.A visitor views the Orbs in Seoul on April 14, 2025. Taemin Ha for TIMETools for Humanity aims to “verify” 1 million Koreans over the next year. Taemin Ha for TIMEA couple dozen Orbs have been available in South Korea since 2023, verifying roughly 55,000 people. Now Tools for Humanity is redoubling its efforts there. At an event in a traditional wooden hanok house in central Seoul, an executive announces that 250 Orbs will soon be dispersed around the country—with the aim of verifying 1 million Koreans in the next 12 months. South Korea has high levels of smartphone usage, crypto and AI adoption, and Internet access, while average wages are modest enough for the free Worldcoin on offer to still be an enticing draw—all of which makes it fertile testing ground for the company’s ambitious global expansion. Yet things seem off to a slow start. In a retail space I visited in central Seoul, Tools for Humanity had constructed a wooden structure with eight Orbs facing each other. Locals and tourists wander past looking bemused; few volunteer themselves up. Most who do tell me they are crypto enthusiasts who came intentionally, driven more by the spirit of early adoption than the free coins. The next day, I visit a coffee shop in central Seoul where a chrome Orb sits unassumingly in one corner. Wu Ruijun, a 20-year-old student from China, strikes up a conversation with the barista, who doubles as the Orb’s operator. Wu was invited here by a friend who said both could claim free cryptocurrency if he signed up. The barista speeds him through the process. Wu accepts the privacy disclosure without reading it, and widens his eyes for the Orb. Soon he’s verified. “I wasn’t told anything about the privacy policy,” he says on his way out. “I just came for the money.”As Altman’s car winds through San Francisco, I ask about the vision he laid out in 2019: that AI would make it harder for us to trust each other online. To my surprise, he rejects the framing. “I’m much more [about] like: what is the good we can create, rather than the bad we can stop?” he says. “It’s not like, ‘Oh, we’ve got to avoid the bot overrun’ or whatever. It’s just that we can do a lot of special things for humans.” It’s an answer that may reflect how his role has changed over the years. Altman is now the chief public cheerleader of a $300 billion company that’s touting the transformative utility of AI agents. The rise of agents, he and others say, will be a boon for our quality of life—like having an assistant on hand who can answer your most pressing questions, carry out mundane tasks, and help you develop new skills. It’s an optimistic vision that may well pan out. But it doesn’t quite fit with the prophecies of AI-enabled infopocalypse that Tools for Humanity was founded upon.Altman waves away a question about the influence he and other investors stand to gain if their vision is realized. Most holders, he assumes, will have already started selling their tokens—too early, he adds. “What I think would be bad is if an early crew had a lot of control over the protocol,” he says, “and that’s where I think the commitment to decentralization is so cool.” Altman is referring to the World Protocol, the underlying technology upon which the Orb, Worldcoin, and World ID all rely. Tools for Humanity is developing it, but has committed to giving control to its users over time—a process they say will prevent power from being concentrated in the hands of a few executives or investors. Tools for Humanity would remain a for-profit company, and could levy fees on platforms that use World ID, but other companies would be able to compete for customers by building alternative apps—or even alternative Orbs. The plan draws on ideas that animated the crypto ecosystem in the late 2010s and early 2020s, when evangelists for emerging blockchain technologies argued that the centralization of power—especially in large so-called “Web 2.0” tech companies—was responsible for many of the problems plaguing the modern Internet. Just as decentralized cryptocurrencies could reform a financial system controlled by economic elites, so too would it be possible to create decentralized organizations, run by their members instead of CEOs. How such a system might work in practice remains unclear. “Building a community-based governance system,” Tools for Humanity says in a 2023 white paper, “represents perhaps the most formidable challenge of the entire project.”Altman has a pattern of making idealistic promises that shift over time. He founded OpenAI as a nonprofit in 2015, with a mission to develop AGI safely and for the benefit of all humanity. To raise money, OpenAI restructured itself as a for-profit company in 2019, but with overall control still in the hands of its nonprofit board. Last year, Altman proposed yet another restructure—one which would dilute the board’s control and allow more profits to flow to shareholders. Why, I ask, should the public trust Tools for Humanity’s commitment to freely surrender influence and power? “I think you will just see the continued decentralization via the protocol,” he says. “The value here is going to live in the network, and the network will be owned and governed by a lot of people.” Altman talks less about universal basic income these days. He recently mused about an alternative, which he called “universal basic compute.” Instead of AI companies redistributing their profits, he seemed to suggest, they could instead give everyone in the world fair access to super-powerful AI. Blania tells me he recently “made the decision to stop talking” about UBI at Tools for Humanity. “UBI is one potential answer,” he says. “Just giving [people] access to the latest [AI] models and having them learn faster and better is another.” Says Altman: “I still don’t know what the right answer is. I believe we should do a better job of distribution of resources than we currently do.” When I probe the question of why people should trust him, Altman gets irritated. “I understand that you hate AI, and that’s fine,” he says. “If you want to frame it as the downside of AI is that there’s going to be a proliferation of very convincing AI systems that are pretending to be human, and we need ways to know what is really human-authorized versus not, then yeah, I think you can call that a downside of AI. It’s not how I would naturally frame it.” The phrase human-authorized hints at a tension between World ID and OpenAI’s plans for AI agents. An Internet where a World ID is required to access most services might impede the usefulness of the agents that OpenAI and others are developing. So Tools for Humanity is building a system that would allow users to delegate their World ID to an agent, allowing the bot to take actions online on their behalf, according to Tiago Sada, the company’s chief product officer. “We’ve built everything in a way that can be very easily delegatable to an agent,” Sada says. It’s a measure that would allow humans to be held accountable for the actions of their AIs. But it suggests that Tools for Humanity’s mission may be shifting beyond simply proving humanity, and toward becoming the infrastructure that enables AI agents to proliferate with human authorization. World ID doesn’t tell you whether a piece of content is AI-generated or human-generated; all it tells you is whether the account that posted it is a human or a bot. Even in a world where everybody had a World ID, our online spaces might still be filled with AI-generated text, images, and videos.As I say goodbye to Altman, I’m left feeling conflicted about his project. If the Internet is going to be transformed by AI agents, then some kind of proof-of-humanity system will almost certainly be necessary. Yet if the Orb becomes a piece of Internet infrastructure, it could give Altman—a beneficiary of the proliferation of AI content—significant influence over a leading defense mechanism against it. People might have no choice but to participate in the network in order to access social media or online services.I thought of an encounter I witnessed in Seoul. In the room above the restaurant, Cho Jeong-yeon, 75, watched her friend get verified by an Orb. Cho had been invited to do the same, but demurred. The reward wasn’t enough for her to surrender a part of her identity. “Your iris is uniquely yours, and we don’t really know how it might be used,” she says. “Seeing the machine made me think: are we becoming machines instead of humans now? Everything is changing, and we don’t know how it’ll all turn out.”—With reporting by Stephen Kim/Seoul. This story was supported by Tarbell Grants.Correction, May 30The original version of this story misstated the market capitalization of Worldcoin if all coins were in circulation. It is $12 billion, not $1.2 billion.