World, the biometric identification system co-founded by the boss of OpenAI, is a step towards its ultimate goal: building a “superapp” inspired by the Chinese WeChat.
Imagine. When booking your next vacation, rather than browsing Google looking for a hotel or Airbnb, you ask ChatGPT directly to find an establishment matching your criteria (price range, suitable for a family with children, near the sea, etc.). Once you have made your choice, the reservation and payment are managed directly on the chatbot. To buy train and plane tickets, the same thing: you give your dates to the chatbot, the price you are willing to pay and the number of maximum connections desired, it finds the ideal ticket and reserves it for you. Need to take out travel insurance? ChatGPT takes care of that. A visa to obtain? Same thing, everything goes through ChatGPT. A taxi to order from the airport? You guessed it: ChatGPT is on the case.
This is the vision that Sam Altman dreams of for the future of OpenAI: that of a universal portal allowing access to all facets of the web. “Tomorrow, the chatbot will be an ultra-competent colleague who knows absolutely everything about my life, every email, every conversation I’ve ever had,” imagines the entrepreneur.
An old dream never achieved
This vision does not come out of nowhere: it is largely inspired by a Chinese application, WeChat. Owned by the Tencent group, it is a kind of super WhatsApp that the Chinese have used for years to communicate with their friends, but also to make online purchases, order taxis, buy train tickets or even manage their health. This “superapp” has long been a fantasy of tech bosses, obsessed by the “winner-take-all” dimension of the web market and by the dream of taking the lion’s share of it by replicating the success of the Chinese giant.
In 2022, shortly after the acquisition of Twitter, Elon Musk announced to his teams his desire to take inspiration from WeChat to add features to his platform. Two years earlier, Snap offered developers the possibility of inserting applications into Snapchat, already assuming that it wanted to reproduce the success of WeChat.
Meta also tried it: when announcing the launch of its digital currency Libra (renamed Diem, then finally abandoned), Mark Zuckerberg showed his desire to insert a payment system through its various platforms (WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram). An attempt to introduce online commerce into messaging applications that was strongly reminiscent of WeChat. Uber, PayPal and neobanks like Revolut have also tried to build complex ecosystems reminiscent of the Chinese application.
A layer of biometric trust via the World app
At OpenAI, this vision takes several dimensions. First, there is Sam Altman’s effort to allow developers of third-party applications like Uber, Zillow, Booking or Spotify to integrate their services directly with ChatGPT, thus making the chatbot a universal platform that could one day serve as a single point of contact for the web.
But a single point of contact also means a single point of failure. This is where another baby from Sam Altman comes into play, World, a biometric identification project which, via an iris scanning device, makes it possible to identify a user in an infallible manner and to reliably distinguish a human from an AI. Launched in mid-December, the latest version of the application includes several new features, including encrypted messaging integration and the ability to make cryptocurrency payments.
From there, it’s not hard to imagine World providing the crucial layer of trust for OpenAI’s future superapp, ensuring that interactions and transactions take place between real people whose personalities cannot be usurped by an AI or a human hacker. Payments could be managed entirely through the app.
Why Sam Altman Could Succeed…
“WeChat has become a super app in China by aggregating applications into a single interface. ChatGPT is doing the opposite. They are making applications useless,” analyzes Simon Taylor, a fintech expert. He sees this as a blessing for developers who want to quickly gain market share on an emerging platform, and a danger for the supremacy of Apple and its App Store, which OpenAI threatens to pull the rug out from under.
But if there is one company capable of creating a super‑app, it’s OpenAI. With its enormous commercial success, the company has access to unlimited capital. ChatGPT has 800 million weekly active users, and that number continues to grow.
“OpenAI is the first company in a generation to invent a new way to interact with computers. Its intelligent chat interface naturally lends itself to the integration of other applications and services. My own experience with Instant Checkout confirms that you can make purchases very fluidly within the ChatGPT interface,” said Thomas Smith, an AI expert, on his Substack.
Thanks to its advance on generative AI which places it at the center of the game of the future web ecosystem, Sam Altman thus has a certain number of cards in hand that his predecessors did not have.
…and why the game is still far from won
A first obstacle in the way of the OpenAI boss, however, consists of his rivals within the Big Tech ecosystem. For Google, which has a turnover of 350 billion dollars (compared to ten billion for OpenAI), it is obvious that competition from a super-ChatGPT would threaten its monopoly on online search. And the recent performances of its latest Gemini model show that the Californian giant does not intend to give up without a fight.
Another obstacle is at the level of regulations. Replicating the success of WeChat involves tackling highly regulated markets, such as finance and health, which are much more difficult for a tech company to master, whatever its financial means, than the world of social networks and AI.
The lack of regulations around data and AI security in the United States (which is not about to change with the Trump administration in charge) also constitutes an obstacle. The lack of clear rules at the national level on how companies must manage and protect data can indeed become a real headache when a company intends to pass highly confidential data (such as health or financial data) through a multi-channel application, without risking a class action lawsuit.
In the absence of a rule at the federal level, companies must also comply with state rules, which can vary considerably. California, for example, has a protective arsenal modeled on the European GDPR, while Texas offers almost no protection to users. Facebook had already struggled with this problem for its digital currency project, with American elected officials having heavily questioned the company’s ability, already marred by several scandals over the management of personal data, to combine a payment system with its gigantic platform for collecting and selling data for marketing purposes. Sam Altman could in turn be regularly forced to swap his t-shirt for a suit and tie in the years to come.
