Nick Pickles, a former high-up at Elon Musk’s social media platform X, is now working at a startup run by Musk’s rival, fellow OpenAI founder Sam Altman.
Musk and Altman co-founded ChatGPT-maker OpenAI back in 2015 but their relationship has since soured amid a legal feud.
Pickles, who resigned from the position of head of global affairs at X in September, told Reuters he will serve as chief policy officer for Altman’s Tools for Humanity.
Tools for Humanity is the company building the technology that will support World Network, a venture formerly known as Worldcoin that will enable users to download a wallet app with a digital identity known as World ID.
Pickles told Reuters that AI is “on the cusp” of surpassing traditional online defenses like Captcha puzzles, used to verify whether a user is human which will further erode trust.
"It's imminent," said Pickles. "Throughout my time at X and at Twitter, one of the consistent issues that kept coming up is, 'Is this a real account or a bot?'" He added: "I saw every day how this issue is going to be central to the future of online interaction."
Pickles declined to comment on the pending litigation between Altman and Musk.