What is Sentient? Why is AI rising star Sentient so valuable?

What is Sentient? Why is AI rising star Sentient so valuable? Last night, the open source AI platform Sentient announced the completion of US$85 million in seed round financing. This round of financing was co-led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Pantera Capital and Framework Ventures, and included Ethereal Ventures, Foresight Ventures, Robot Ventures, Symbolic Capital, Delphi Ventures, Hack VC, Arrington Capital, HashKey Capital and Canonical Crypto participated in the investment.

This huge financing is particularly eye-catching in the current slightly sluggish market environment, and among Sentient’s core think tanks and contributors are Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal and EigenLayer founder and CEO Sreeram Kannan. . So why does Sentient attract so much attention and attention? What is Sentient? Why is Sentient so valuable?

Today, the editor of this website will introduce Sentient to you in detail. Friends who need it can take a look!

What is Sentient?

Sentient is an AI research organization dedicated to building an open general artificial intelligence (AGI) economy. It is developing a platform and protocol that allows open source AI developers to realize or monetize their models, data and other innovations. Here, Developers can collaborate to build powerful AI reminders and become key stakeholders in driving AI change and prosperity in the new open AGI economy.

Faced with the current lack of incentive mechanisms in the AI ​​field and the difficulty of achieving success alone, Sentient proposed the "OML" (Open, Monetized, Loyal) model concept, hoping to promote a shared and open AGI economy through the OML model and build a data-driven The shared open AGI economic system in which millions of AI agents and billions of users participate provides inexhaustible power for the innovation and development of downstream applications.

Sentient strategic director Sandeep Nailwal (Co-founder of Polygon) said, "Sentient will be built on Polygon AggLayer and will reward engineers for completing tasks such as labeling and refining data, as well as other activities for training artificial intelligence models. If successful, Sentient may It will change the course of the relationship between humans and AI." Sandeep Nailwal said that he is also a core contributor of Sentient.

In addition, Sentient will also build a boundaryless collaboration and discussion platform to ensure that each participant’s incentives and contributions are fairly recognized, promote the collision and integration of innovative thinking, and at the same time enhance the transparency and transparency of the entire system. Credibility.

According to Sandeep Nailwal, the idea for Sentient originated from a conversation between him and Sreeram Kannan, the founder of EigenLayer, when the two discussed how cryptocurrencies can solve the problems of AI decentralization and security, and how Polygon can play a role in this The idea of ​​playing a role in this structural shift sowed the seeds of hope for Sentient. Later, Sreeram Kannan shared this idea with Princeton University professor Pramod Viswanath and Indian Institute of Science professor Himanshu Tyagi. Coincidentally, this coincided with the fact that they were studying similar things, and the research results were eventually converted into Sentient .

What is the meaning of OPEN AGI?

First, let’s go back to what AGI is:

Artificial General Intelligence refers to an intelligent system that can understand, learn and apply knowledge to perform various tasks. Such intelligent systems have human-like cognitive abilities and are capable of reasoning and problem-solving in multiple domains.

AGI is one of the ultimate goals of artificial intelligence research. Although current AI systems perform well on specific tasks, they are still a long way from achieving true AGI. Existing AGI is unevenly distributed, with big countries and large companies having much higher AGI levels than others. Building open AGI aims to ensure that AGI technology does not only serve a few wealthy countries and companies, but can benefit more individuals and institutions around the world, especially those in areas with limited resources. This can reduce the digital divide and promote the balanced development of global scientific and technological progress.

Let open source last longer

The current AI technology is monopolized by a few corporate organizations, and the development of open source AI really lacks enough incentives for developers, and with the development of AI, open source developers There is no long-term benefit to provide support. At the same time, if you want to achieve better development results, you also need open source contribution cooperation among developers. It can be seen that the development status of open source AI is more difficult than imagined, let alone trying to compete with the powerful AI in the hands of monopoly organizations.

Yes, AI should be open source and free, but if the result of insisting on open source is that you will not have enough to eat, then the "antitrust" issue will have to be put aside.

Sentient officially calls itself the "Open AGI Foundation" and its goal is to promote AI innovation through a community-driven approach.

To this end, Sentient plans to build an AI platform based on Polygon Agglayer for developers to collaborate and monetize their development contributions. Developers can quickly collaborate through the platform and monetize their contributions. By stimulating developers, Open AGI can develop better and further.

OML model

In order to realize the platform concept of "protecting the world and making everyone happy", Sentient launched a special managed AI model "OML", namely Open (open), Monetizable (monetizable) and Loyal (loyal)

This framework is designed to ensure that the platform remains open, monetizable, and loyal to the community while supporting developer use.

Roadmap

Sentient test network will be launched this quarter, and Sentient’s short, medium and long-term development path plans are listed in the official introduction document. The short- and medium-term goals are to collaborate with the community on the Sentient AI platform (carrying out the first community activities), develop on-chain protocols, build ecosystems, and formulate OML model standards. The long-term goals focus on AI models built through community collaboration, an open AGI future powered by OML, and stimulating innovation for AI developers.

Sentient Core Think Tank and Contributors

According to Sentient officials, the Sentient Foundation is a non-profit organization. In addition to Sandeep Nailwal, the steering committee also includes two engineering professors and a venture studio, namely :

1. Pramod Viswanath, Forrest G. Hamrick Professor of Engineering at Princeton University: responsible for research guidance;

2. Himanshu Tyagi, Professor of Engineering at Indian Institute of Science: responsible for technical guidance;

3. Polygon Co-founder Sandeep Nailwal: Responsible for strategic guidance;

4. Sensys, the venture studio that creates products and applications for Sentient, will be responsible for growth. Sensys is led by Symbolic Capital co-founder Kenzi Wang.

It is worth mentioning that Pramod Viswanath, who is responsible for research guidance, has made outstanding contributions in the field of wireless communications. While serving as a founding engineer at Flarion Technologies in 2020, he helped develop the framework that became the basis of the 4G LTE wireless network. Pramod Viswanath also co-authored the textbook Fundamentals of Wireless Communication and is the co-founder of blockchain startup Kaleidscope.

The research direction of Pramod Viswanath Laboratory is also closely connected with Sentient’s future blueprint. Ben, who once taught together with Professor Pramod Viswanath at Princeton University, said last month that in a course where students work in groups to build AI applications for blockchain and build blockchain applications for AI, some projects may be Implemented on the Sentient platform. Ben also revealed the research directions of Pramod’s laboratory, including AI agents for smart contract generation and verification, smart blockchain wallets for automatic fraud detection, AI-driven blockchain browsers, and Gas prediction on-chain and off-chain. Models, AI-driven doing things, Smart DAOs and Data DAOs, and AI-driven lowest-cost cross-chain path detection.

Sentient’s contributor lineup is equally impressive. There are 11 officially listed contributors, of which 4 are from the University of Washington and 4 are from Princeton University. Most of them are researchers or researchers in AI and blockchain research, computer science, etc. professor. In addition, Sandeep Nailwal said that the Sentient AI team also includes veterans from Google, Deepmind and other leading AI companies.

Sentient Roadmap

Sentient has officially listed a relatively clear roadmap. It will build the Sentient AI Platform and blockchain protocol in the short to medium term, and then build a new basic model and OML model supported by community contributions. Open AGI and launch economic incentives and monetization for AI Builders. This quarter Sentient entered the testnet stage.

Behind the Sentient team and founding

Looking through the official information of Sentient, we can find that the core figures of Sentient mainly include Polygon co-founder and AggLayer founder Sandeep Nailwal, EigenLayer founder Sreeram Kannan, Princeton Web3 professor Pramod Viswanath, Indian Institute of Science and Technology Institute (IISC) Professor Himanshu Tyagi.

They are the founders of hugely successful star encryption projects (Polygon and EigenLayer) and well-known professors in academia, so it is very easy to understand why they attracted huge bets from top VCs.

As Founders Fund partner Joey Krug bluntly said, investing in Sentient is mainly an investment in the team.

Sandeep Nailwal talks about the origin of Sentient:

I was in Dubai not long ago with EigenLayer founder Sreeram Kannan to discuss my thoughts on how crypto can solve the centralization and security issues of AI, and how Polygon can play a role in shaping this major shift in humanity. I told him, but what if an AI model was loyal to its community of creators? He didn't smile. Instead, he asked a lot of questions and I explained my thought process to him. Finally he said it could be huge. He shared my thinking with Princeton professor Pramod Viswanath (who co-invented Flash OFDM, the technology behind the 4G wireless standard) and Indian Institute of Science (IISC) Himanshu Tyagi, who were already working on something similar. Pramod said that this thinking may give rise to a new branch of AI+cryptography research, which he calls AI-native cryptography. This research became Sentient.

It will be built on Polygon Agglayer and I will help them as a core contributor. This project is very ambitious and model-faithful, trying to solve a problem that has never been tackled from this direction. Through this financing, Sentient has attracted some of the best AI talents in the world to join, and the AI ​​team is also working with senior talents from Google, Deepmind and other top artificial intelligence companies in the world. If successful, Sentient could change humans' relationship with AI. Let's try the build and see how it goes.

Other contributors are also elites from academia and industry, including:

Why investors invest in Sentient

After Sentient officially announced that it had received seed round financing, the heads of various VCs who participated in the investment also One after another came out and published articles describing the thinking behind investing in Sentient.

Tommy, co-founder of Delphi Digital and founding partner of Delphi Ventures:

Black box autocratic AI is the enemy in the future, while global, permissionless AI innovation is the goal. The Sentient team is focused on hosting open source models that the world can review and build on, but incorporating cryptographic incentives to ensure capex costs and value are protected is ambitious but will be very important if solved.

Framework Ventures:

We just co-led an $85 million round in Sentient, an AI research organization building a new open AGI economy for AI builders and creators. Here's why we're excited to support this team.

The current state of AI is reminiscent of the closed-source software era of 1995. A small number of organizations dominate, concentrating enormous power. Open source AI development exists, but there are insufficient incentives to allow developers to become equal stakeholders.

Sentient enables open source AI developers to (1) monetize their models, data, and innovations, (2) collaborate to build powerful AI together, and (3) become important stakeholders in the new open AGI economy. We think this will be a game changer for the AI ​​community.

Sentient is building an AI platform that relies on the underlying blockchain protocol and incentive mechanism. AI models hosted on Sentient are Open, Monetizable, and Loyal (OML), meaning they are aligned with the community that built them and are enforced by the blockchain.

Founders Fund Partner Joey Krug:

Our investment in Sentient is mainly an investment in the team, but there are also some interesting topics related to open source and closed source AI. I've known Pramod and Sandeep for years and they are both super sharp technologists. Pramod did a lot of early work on wireless networks and also published many novel papers in the field of cryptography (on scaling, networking, etc.). I first met Sandeep during the Augur days when we were working on Matic (now Polygon). I'm excited to see him leading Sentient. One of the great things about Founders Fund is that our partners and the founders of the projects we invest in can have different perspectives, and we actually welcome that!

While I believe the advantages of open source (even with natsec tweaks) outweigh the disadvantages, I agree with the point below that the economics of open source AI are meaningless today. Software with high capex is very different from traditional software with low capex. If you spend $10 billion training a model, you can’t give it away for free. Our investment in Sentient aims to change that. They are trying to embed encryption in the LMS (learning management system) so if you don't pay for the model you can't use it. They call it “model loyalty.” This way, the model can still be open source but effectively unavailable without paying for it. An MVP for this model can be released using Nvidia's recent TEE trusted hardware. The rough mental model is that Ethereum is open source, but not free to use, or has things like DRM (Digital Rights Management).

This is definitely a huge research challenge, but if they solve it, it could actually enable the monetization of open source AI models. If you can monetize them, capitalist incentives may drive more powerful/smarter open source models than under the current paradigm.

Paul Veradittakit, Partner at Panteral Capital:

Sentient’s technology will pave the way for a new era of AI. By promoting an open source, community-governed approach to AGI, Sentient will enhance innovation, collaboration, and transparency. The goal is for Sentient to not only compete with existing AI solutions, but also redefine the standard for ethical AI development and deployment.

Dovey Wan, founder of Primitive Ventures:

Monopoly control of AI power will drive everyone to fight for data, model and computing autonomy. Sentient will challenge the incumbent and lead the d/acc movement. We are witnessing the convergence of several trends: binary code becoming currency code, machine programs becoming social contract programs, and human language becoming programming languages. This integration heralds a new era. Human need: Embracing the principles of decentralization, transparency, and collective ownership.

Franklin Bi, Partner at Panteral Capital:

Let’s make sure Open AI can beat OpenAI. In the long run, open systems beat closed systems.

Summary

As Primitive Ventures founder Dovey Wan said, we are witnessing the integration of several trends: "Binary code becomes currency code", "Machine program becomes social contract program" and "Human language becomes programming language". This kind of Convergence heralds a new era that embraces the principles of decentralization, transparency and collective ownership. Pantera Capital partner Franklin Bi further said, "Open systems will surpass closed systems, allowing Open AI to defeat OpenAI."

Sentient's grand vision of "ensuring that AI benefits all mankind" is not to compete with existing AI solutions, but to pave the way for the next generation of AI's intelligent leap. Of course, its implementation path and operation method still need to be refined in detail, but every attempt is an exploration and practice of future possibilities.

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