By Karen, Foresight News

Last night, open source AI platform Sentient announced that it had completed $85 million in seed financing. This round of financing was jointly led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, Pantera Capital and Framework Ventures, and participated by Ethereal Ventures, Foresight Ventures, Robot Ventures, Symbolic Capital, Delphi Ventures, Hack VC, Arrington Capital, HashKey Capital and Canonical Crypto.

This huge amount of financing is particularly eye-catching in the current market environment, and Sentient's core think tank and contributors include Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal and EigenLayer founder and CEO Sreeram Kannan. So how can Sentient attract so much 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 transformation and prosperity in the new open AGI economy.

Faced with the current situation in the AI ​​field where incentive mechanisms are lacking and it is difficult to succeed alone, Sentient has proposed the "OML" (open, monetized, loyal) model concept, hoping to promote a shared and open AGI economy through the OML model, and build a shared and open AGI economic system with the participation of millions of AI agents and billions of users, providing inexhaustible power for the innovation and development of downstream applications.

“Sentient will be built on top of the Polygon AggLayer and will reward engineers for tasks like labeling and refining data, as well as other activities for training AI models,” said Sandeep Nailwal, strategic director at Sentient, who also said he is a core contributor to Sentient. “If successful, Sentient could change the course of humanity’s relationship with AI.”

In addition, Sentient will build a borderless collaboration and discussion platform to ensure that the incentives and contributions of each participant are fairly recognized, promote the collision and integration of innovative thinking, and enhance the transparency and credibility of the entire system.

According to Sandeep Nailwal, the idea of ​​Sentient originated from a conversation between him and Sreeram Kannan, the founder of EigenLayer, when the two discussed how cryptocurrency can solve the problems of AI decentralization and security, and how Polygon can play a role in this structural transformation, sowing the seeds of hope for the germination of Sentient. Afterwards, Sreeram Kannan shared this idea with Pramod Viswanath, a professor at Princeton University, and Himanshu Tyagi, a professor at the Indian Institute of Science. Coincidentally, this coincided with their research on similar things, and eventually the research results were 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, namely:

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

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

3. Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon: responsible for strategic guidance;

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

It is worth mentioning that Pramod Viswanath, who is responsible for research guidance, has made outstanding contributions in the field of wireless communications. During his tenure 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's lab is also closely linked to Sentient's future blueprint. Ben, who taught with Professor Pramod Viswanath at Princeton University, said last month that in a course, students worked in groups to build AI applications for blockchains and blockchain applications for AI, and some projects might be implemented on the Sentient platform. Ben also revealed the research directions of Pramod's lab, including AI agents for smart contract generation and verification, smart blockchain wallets for automatic fraud detection, AI-driven blockchain browsers, Gas prediction on-chain and off-chain models, AI-driven practical work, Smart DAOs and Data DAOs, and AI-driven minimum cost cross-chain path detection.

Sentient's contributors are also impressive. The official list of 11 contributors includes 4 from the University of Washington and 4 from Princeton University. Most of them are researchers or professors in AI, blockchain research, and computer science. In addition, Sandeep Nailwal said that the Sentient AI team also includes senior people from Google, Deepmind, and other leading AI companies.

Sentient Roadmap

Sentient has officially listed a relatively clear roadmap, which will build the Sentient AI Platform and blockchain protocol in the short and medium term, and then build a new basic model built by community contributions, an open AGI supported by the OML model, and start economic incentives and monetization for AI Builder. This quarter, Sentient entered the testnet stage.

summary

As Dovey Wan, founder of Primitive Ventures, said, we are witnessing the convergence of several trends: "binary code becomes currency code", "machine programs become social contract programs", and "human languages ​​become programming languages", which heralds the arrival of a new era, that is, embracing the principles of decentralization, transparency, and collective ownership. Franklin Bi, partner of Pantera Capital, further stated that "open systems will surpass closed systems and let Open AI beat OpenAI".

Sentient's grand vision of "ensuring that AI benefits all of humanity" is not to compete with existing AI solutions, but to pave the way for the next generation of AI to achieve intelligent leaps. Of course, the implementation path and operation mode are still to be perfected in details, but every attempt is an exploration and practice of future possibilities.