The seed round raised only US$85 million. Why is Sentient, the rising AI star, 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, and 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?

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 with each other 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 AI economy. 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 (Polygon co-founder) 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 ideas, 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 .

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, respectively:

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. Co-founder of Polygon 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 4G LTE wireless networks. 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, there may be some projects. 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 built with community contributions and an open OML model. AGI and launch economic incentives and monetization for AI Builders. This quarter Sentient entered the testnet stage.

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 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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