Original author: TechFlow
Original source: TechFlow
AI’s need for encryption is still under discussion, but the encryption world seems to be inseparable from AI’s storytelling.
“No AI, no encryption” has become the representative phenomenon of this cycle. And as it stands, the more AI stories are told, the more people buy into them.
On July 2, the open source AI collaboration platform Sentient announced a financing of US$85 million, led by top VCs such as Founders Fund, Pantera Capital and Framework Ventures, and followed by Ethereal Ventures, Robot Ventures, Symbolic Capital, Delphi Ventures and others. This is another wave of huge financing.
In this round of "atypical bull market", this huge seed round financing is extremely dazzling. The last phenomenal AI money-making king can be traced back to Bittensor?
Is this Sentient something or just another round of hype? Let’s take a look.
An AI “trailer” co-produced by China and India?
According to a tweet by Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal, the birth of Sentient originated from a conversation between him and EigenLayer founder Sreeram Kannan about the future development of encryption and AI. Sreeram Kannan then shared this conversation with Princeton University professor Pramod Viswanath (co-inventor of Flash OFDM, a technology that supports 4G wireless standards) and Indian Institute of Science professor Himanshu Tyagi, and the result coincided with their research. After the collision of ideas, Sentient officially debuted.
Interestingly, three of the four core contributors to the project are Indians, and among the investors there are several Chinese-founded institutions. Are China and India working together to set up a stall and do something big?
With both money and people, what does this Sino-Indian co-produced “AI blockbuster” intend to do in this round of encrypted AI cycle?
We looked through the materials of the project and can only say that this Sino-Indian co-production has not yet arrived and is still in the trailer stage.
Make open source last longer
The current AI technology is monopolized by a few companies and organizations. At the same time, there is a lack of sufficient incentives for developers to develop open source AI. As AI develops, open source developers do not have long-term benefits to support them. At the same time, in order to achieve better development results, open source contributions and cooperation among developers are also needed. It can be seen that the current status of open source AI development is more difficult than expected, not to mention the desire to compete with the powerful AI in the hands of monopoly organizations.
Yes, AI should be open source and free, but if insisting on open source results in not having enough to eat, then the issue of “anti-monopoly” will have to be put on the back burner.
Sentient officially calls itself the "Open AGI Foundation," with the goal of promoting 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 motivating developers, Open AGI will develop better and further.
OML Model
In order to realize the platform concept of "sheltering the poor and bringing joy to the world", Sentient launched a special managed AI model "OML", which stands for Open, Monetizable and Loyal.
This framework is designed to ensure that the platform maintains openness, monetization capabilities, and loyalty to the community while supporting developer use.
Roadmap
The Sentient testnet will be launched this quarter. The official introduction document lists Sentient's plans for short-, medium- and long-term development paths. The short- and medium-term goals are to collaborate with the Sentient AI platform and the community (carry out the first community activity), develop on-chain protocols, build an ecosystem and formulate OML model standards. The long-term goal focuses on AI models built by community collaboration, the future of open AGI supported by OML and incentive innovation for AI developers.
Conclusion
Sentient has a big background and good ideas, but many Web3 AI projects are working on contribution incentives and ownership, and Sentient is not the first to bring it up. Moreover, despite such a huge amount of financing, few people paid attention to this project before, and Sentient is still at a stage where no products have been launched.
As for why so many institutions are willing to invest so much money in Sentient, which is still in its blank stage, it may be out of trust in "Sandeep taking the lead". After all, in such an atypical bull market, it is better to invest the money in places with stories, people and backgrounds. The combination of AI + Polygon can also give investors an explanation, right? After all, the plate is getting bigger and bigger, and the VCs will definitely not pay for the feast in the end.
After several rounds of so-called top-level projects, it seems increasingly clear that investing in crypto projects is investing in people, and doing projects is organizing a group;
You cannot judge whether this is a copycat approach in the upstream industry where "making money is as easy as breathing" or a courageous and strategic move that truly sees the technological trend and dares to bet on it.
However, as long as the price goes up, it is justice and the future; as long as the price goes down, it is a scam and air.
Let’s keep an eye on how far Sentient can go in the future to achieve “sustainable development of AI and improvement of personnel security”, whether it can truly differentiate itself from its peers, and whether it can capture users with limited attention spans.
