Sentient, an ambitious open-source artificial intelligence (AI) development platform, has successfully raised $85 million in a seed funding round. Co-led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Pantera Capital, and Framework Ventures, this funding round marks a significant step towards creating a community-driven AI ecosystem. The announcement was made on Tuesday, highlighting the platform’s potential to challenge the centralized AI landscape.
Sentient boasts an impressive lineup of core contributors and advisors. Among them is Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon, who has been instrumental in driving the project forward. Nailwal is joined by two prominent professors: Pramod Viswanath, the Forrest G. Hamrick Professor of Engineering at Princeton University, and co-inventor of Flash OFDM, the technology behind the 4G wireless standard, and Himanshu Tyagi, a Professor of Engineering at the Indian Institute of Science. Additionally, the startup Sensys, founded by Kenzi Wang, co-founder of Symbolic Capital, aims to support startups within the Sentient ecosystem.
Sreeram Kannan, founder and CEO of EigenLayer, has been an advisor to Sentient since its inception. Kannan, who was a student of Viswanath, played a crucial role in uniting the team behind Sentient.
The seed funding round began in March and concluded in May, according to Nailwal. While specific details regarding the structure and valuation of the round were not disclosed, the participation of notable investors such as Ethereal Ventures, Robot Ventures, Symbolic Capital, Delphi Ventures, Hack VC, Arrington Capital, HashKey Capital, Canonical Crypto, and Foresight Ventures underscores the significant interest and confidence in Sentient’s vision.
With this substantial financial backing, Sentient is poised to build and expand its open-source AI platform. The project’s core mission is to decentralize AI development, making it more accessible and ethically sound. “AI today is becoming incredibly centralized, and the safety and ethics of AI are also questionable,” Nailwal stated. “So community-built AI models are the key.”
Unlike OpenAI, which restricts users to building applications without direct access to its models, Sentient will enable users to access and contribute to the AI models directly. This community-driven approach aims to foster innovation and collaboration, allowing contributors to have co-ownership of the AI models they help create. Tyagi explained that Sentient will launch "campaigns" with specific metrics for evaluating contributions, rewarding participants based on their involvement. Rewards will come in various forms, including co-ownership and future usage rewards.
Joey Krug, partner at Founders Fund, emphasized the importance of incentivizing open-source AI. “Currently, anyone is able to just copy models without paying for them, and Sentient aims to solve this incentive problem which disincentivizes open-source AI. This is a really interesting research area and we’re thrilled to support the team at Sentient as they make this vision a reality.”
Sentient plans to integrate closely with Polygon, leveraging the Polygon Chain Development Kit (CDK) to potentially create its own chain. This integration underscores the collaboration between Nailwal’s endeavors with Polygon and the new horizons Sentient aims to explore within the AI landscape.
Sentient is expected to launch its testnet in the third quarter of this year. The project’s focus is on building its platform and expanding its team. “AI is capital-intensive, and talent is very costly,” Nailwal noted, explaining the rationale behind the substantial seed round. Currently, Sentient has fewer than 20 employees across the U.S. and India and plans to hire around 10 more in research and engineering roles soon.
With a robust funding base and a vision for decentralized, community-driven AI, Sentient is set to make significant strides in the AI industry. The platform’s emphasis on ethical AI development and user contributions marks a departure from the traditional centralized models, potentially setting a new standard in the AI development space. As Sentient prepares for its testnet launch, the tech community eagerly anticipates the impact of this innovative platform.
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