At the storefront event, a man waiting outside told me heâd booked an appointment for 11:30, but noted he was an hour early, and wasn’t allowed to come inside yet. He was visiting from Poland, and said his boss had attended the party the night before and was âsuper hypedâ about the orb concept. âI don’t know if it’s gonna be like a worldwide revolution, but I just want to be on the wave,â he said.
âMy only hesitation is that they are super huge,â he added. âI’m pretty afraid that they can actually do some stuff that we will not know about. That can be a little bit shady, but all in all, like most of the businesses and most of the activities that we participate in have some kind of shadier sides.â
Back inside the store, Worldâs chief business officer Trevor Traina began a press conference. He called World âthe brainchild of Sam Altman and Alex Blaniaâ and waxed poetic about expanding to the United States and his former role as a US diplomat.
âFrom this same incredible brain, the brain of Sam Altman, after bringing in the era of artificial intelligence, came the intuition that in this new era, we as human beings will need to know what is real and what is not, that we may actually have to prove our humanness,â Traina said.
After fielding media questions about data privacy and technical glitches (which Traina dubbed orbâs “stage fright”), I asked why the companyâs services werenât available in New York, which my colleagues and I had noticed in the fine print of their launch announcement. “We launched last night,” he claimed. World’s communications team later corrected him: While New Yorkers can download the app, they can’t actually use it there yet.