Learn about Sentient, an AI project that raised $85 million

These two days, the open source artificial intelligence development platform Sentient announced the completion of $85 million in seed round financing, aiming to break the dominance of centralized AI model development in the industry. This huge amount of financing has attracted much attention from the market.

It is disclosed that this round of financing was jointly led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, Pantera Capital and Framework Ventures, and other investors include Ethereal Ventures, Robot Ventures, Symbolic Capital, Delphi Ventures, etc.

The seed round gave $85 million, what is the origin of Sentient?

1. Top team support:One of Sentient's core contributors is Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal. Sentient's consultant is EigenLayer founder and CEO Sreeram Kannan.

2. Backed by Ethereum:The Sentient platform will be built on Polygon, which means that Ethereum is expanding into the field of AI.

3. Disruptive technology concept:Directly compete with OpenAI, create a decentralized artificial general intelligence (AGI) platform, and use blockchain technology to motivate contributors to collaborate, build, replicate and expand AI models, and reward contributors.

These three irresistible advantages make the value of Sentient manifest layer by layer.

Highlight 1: Built by technology giant Sandeep Nailwal

One ​​of the core contributors of Sentient is Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal.

Those who have experienced the last round of bull market must be familiar with this "multi-millionaire" of the Web3 version of the slums. He left the slums in Madrid and turned to lead the multi-billion dollar Web3 company Polygon, leading the "Horseshoe" to upgrade to the Ethereum Layer 2 aggregator, becoming the biggest dark horse in the crypto asset market at the time, creating a market value of tens of billions of dollars.

This is a very passionate story. The fact that Polygon can now rank among the top ten public chains actually has a lot to do with Sandeep Nailwal's values.

Born in the slums of India, Sandeep's classmates dropped out of school quite often since he was a child, and some of them were alcoholics and gamblers. As he grew up, he often had enough motivation to get rid of this kind of life. He wanted to be a big man, didn't want to play small games, and hated failure.

Such values ​​have always been with Sandeep until he founded MATIC Network. It was 2017, and people were crazy about initial coin offerings (ICOs).

As long as there is a white paper, even if there is no product, you can raise funds, and many projects fail after financing.

After launching MATIC Network in India with JD Kanani and Anurag Arjun, the team could easily raise $20 million in funds, but they did not do so because taking shortcuts and making quick money are contrary to Sandeep's big-shot philosophy.

Sandeep responded: "Matic is solving a long-term problem, so it has to choose a slower growth method.

If we get big money early, it may limit our development and vision" In the end, they chose to raise very limited funds-$5 million from Binance, and spent more time to polish the product.

In short, in addition to the team's keen entrepreneurial sense and strong technical capabilities, Sandeep's mental courage must be an indispensable stabilizer in the process of achieving Polygon, and will definitely bring more core souls to Sentient beyond technology.

Highlight 2: Leading Ethereum to the Hottest AI Narrative

Polygon is open and powerful, and its mission is to expand Ethereum and expose more users to Crypto.

Functionally, Polygon aims to create a multi-chain ecosystem compatible with Ethereum, using a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism to process on-chain transactions and obtain security from Ethereum.

This enables blockchain networks to connect and expand, so it is called the "Internet of Blockchains." Simply put, Polygon makes Ethereum faster, more convenient, and cheaper.

Polygon's predecessor was Matic Network, which started as a PoS chain and then evolved into a complete set of expansion solutions and was renamed Polygon. Later, Polygon acquired a bunch of zk technologies and is now focused on achieving unified liquidity and unlimited scalability for Ethereum through AggLayer and CDK.

With the advent of this round of bull market, AI has become one of the most concerned topics, and it has also become an entry point for the old public chain to add new narratives.

Sentient announced that it will be built on Polygon, which also means that Ethereum will move towards the AI ​​field and shine again. In fact, Polygon has shown significant sensitivity in the field of AI very early. In June 2023, it launched Polygon Copilot, and later launched another AI tool Brain.

In comparison, Brain is more comprehensive and can also deploy contracts through AI. On April 19, 2024, the widely watched AI project Ora Protocol announced that its on-chain AI oracle is being integrated with Polygon PoS, allowing developers to use Ora Protocol oracles to build AI-driven dApps, breaking the limitations of smart contracts with AI and richer data sources.

Can Polygon carry a huge AI narrative? The answer is yes. Based on the Polygon aggregation architecture, there can be hundreds of thousands of chains, all connected to a single layer with the security of Ethereum, with the goal of achieving an infinitely growing blockchain network.

These chains will focus on different areas, such as DeFi, game NFTs, and AI projects. For example, Sentient is a project built on the Polygon CDK chain. Specific chains and ecosystems focus on building applications for specific industries, which is Polygon's blueprint in the decentralized world.

If you want to open up AI, a big limitation is the cost, which requires training costs and data collection costs.

Sandeep has publicly expressed his views on this: through cryptographic incentives, these cost issues can be solved through open source, such as the need for a tokenized model, and Polygon will have multiple attempts.

In addition, decentralized computing, such as the DePIN infrastructure for AI computing, has been tried in many ways.

AI is in high demand but limited supply. Although decentralized solutions may solve supply problems, they may not necessarily replace centralized providers, as the latter may be better in coordination and performance.

Highlight 3: Open source AI, competing with tech giants such as Google with subversive ideas

Finding long-term decentralized alternatives for current entities that provide AI services like OpenAI is a demand pain point in the AI ​​era.

First of all, why does AI need to be open source? We all know that artificial intelligence is developing rapidly and has the potential to change many aspects of human life, but there are great risks if these technologies are controlled by a few companies.

Secondly, why do we need decentralized alternatives? Today, the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI) is mainly carried out secretly by large companies because they have a lot of resources.

This closed approach results in all model parameters and variables cannot be checked, verified or distributed by the outside world, and are completely controlled by these companies.

This is also Sandeep's concern, so there is a hope to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI) by building a decentralized open platform to ensure that the benefits of AI can be fairly distributed and the development process is in the interests of everyone.

To solve these problems, Sentient came into being.

Imagine an AI platform that is open and open source, allowing everyone to collaborate, and incentivizes people to build and expand AI models through blockchain technology, from which participants receive rewards.

This is what Sentient is doing, committed to building open source AI models through community contributions to address the centralization and safety ethics issues in the current AI field.

In addition, it aims to compete directly with OpenAI and distinguish itself from it through its community-building approach.

Unlike OpenAI, which restricts users from directly accessing its models, Sentient will allow users to access and contribute to the models, and reward contributors.

Sentient's reward mechanism is achieved by launching "activities", each of which has specific indicators for evaluating contributions and giving rewards.

If it can be achieved, then Sentient will solve the core problem that hinders the development of open source AI: the incentive mechanism.

Because currently, on AI open source platforms, anyone can copy the model at will without paying any fees.

Sentient plans to enter the testnet stage this quarter, and plans to use this round of financing to expand the team, hire experts, etc.

Risk Warning

Sentient's token incentive model has not yet taken shape, which is one of the core structures of the project. If the incentive mechanism is not good enough, then the core problem that hinders the development of open source AI will still be difficult to solve.

The project is in its early stages, there is no mature product at present, the testnet has not yet been launched, the number of community members is small, and there is a lot of uncertainty. It is recommended that users wait for further information disclosure or interact with the project after there is progress.

Before there is less information and the project has not made any progress, please be cautious when clicking on the website and Discord links below Twitter to protect the safety of your funds.

Summary

The rapid development of AI has brought humans to the crossroads of two future worlds. One way is to enter a closed world dominated by a few large companies and closed-source models. The other way is to enter an open world where the model is open source by default and the reasoning is transparent and verifiable.

This open world is our ideal future. Only through blockchain technology can this vision be realized, making artificial intelligence more fair and transparent.

In every bull market, there will be a group of public chains that are in the limelight, and when the bull market ends, another group of public chains will quietly withdraw from the stage. I look forward to Sentient leading Polygon and Ethereum to a deeper future.