At the storefront event, a man waiting outside told me he’d 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 “super hyped” about the orb concept. “I don’t know if it’s gonna be like a worldwide revolution, but I just want to be on the wave,” he said.

“My only hesitation is that they are super huge,” he added. “I’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.”

Trevor Traina speaks during the World Space Flagship Location Opening on May 1, 2025, in San Francisco.

Photograph: Darrell Jackson

Back inside the store, World’s chief business officer, Trevor Traina, began a press conference. He called World “the brainchild of [OpenAI CEO] Sam Altman and [World CEO] Alex Blania” and waxed poetic about expanding to the United States and his former role as a US diplomat.

“From 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,” Traina said.

After he fielded media questions about data privacy and technical glitches (which Traina dubbed orb’s “stage fright”), I asked why the company’s services weren’t 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.