Sentient, an open source development platform for artificial intelligence (AI), has raised $85 million in a seed round led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund along with Pantera Capital and Framework Ventures.
The funds will support engineer recruitment and development of Sentient's open AI platform. The company wants to enable AI developers to monetize their open source models and data, similar to the Super Intelligence Alliance ecosystem.
Sentient argues that the current dominance of closed-source AI has concentrated power in the hands of a small number of organizations, and that open-source AI lacks strong incentives for developers to become equal stakeholders.
Behind the startup are Sandeep Nailwal, founder of Polygon; Pramod Viswanath, a professor at Princeton and co-inventor of the technology that powers the 4G wireless standard; and Himanshu Tyagi, a professor at the Indian Institute of Science.
Sentient has determined that their underlying blockchain protocol and incentive mechanism will ensure economic alignment for developers, helping to develop open artificial intelligence.
Joey Krug, partner at Founders Fund, emphasized that today anyone can copy models without paying, and Sentient is aiming to solve this incentive problem to reduce the incentive for open source AI.
Sentient's testnet is expected to be available this quarter of 2024. Sentient's seed round also received support from organizations such as Robot Ventures, Symbolic Capital, Dao5, Delphi, Primitive Ventures, and many others.
