Look, nobody roots for workers to lose their jobs. But some companies are built on such a ridiculous premise that it’s impossible to ignore the cracks in the foundation — making layoffs all but inevitable.
On Monday this week, the Sam Altman-founded startup Tools for Humanity announced it was laying off an unspecified number of employees, Business Insider reported. The company, which had employed more than 500 people, is valued at $2.5 billion, with backing from big name tech investors including Andreessen Horowitz.
It’s main product is the Orb, a biometric ID device that scans irises in order to provide “proof of humanity” to clients. Basically, the idea goes, Orb is the only way to combat the growing risk of AI deepfakes and scams — a development which Altman, as chief executive of OpenAI, is coincidentally spearheading.
“As we enter the next step of our company strategy and operating priorities, we have made the hard decision to make changes to some roles and teams across the company,” the company told staffers in an all-hands email viewed by BI.
The layoffs come as the company has struggled to find a suitable market for its Orbs. As Time noted in reporting from earlier this year, Tools for Humanity was caught woefully unprepared to scale its technology when AI agents began swarming the internet back in February. “We acknowledge we have a problem,” the company’s chief business officer Trevor Traina told Time. “We’ve been Orb-constrained.”
And though the company’s “World” ID project has found heavyweight partners in software firms like Tinder, Zoom, and Docusign, numerous governments in Asia, Africa, South America, and Europe have halted or outright banned the Orbs due to issues with the company’s collection of biometric information.
The scale of these layoffs will be a telling measure of just how deep the issues are at Tools for Humanity — and whether there’s appetite in the market for a company premised on selling a solution to its own founder’s hubris.
More on layoffs: 99 Percent of CEOs Are Preparing to Lay Off Workers and Replace Them With AI Within Two Years, Survey Finds
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