The crypto market has been bleak recently, with Mt.Gox payouts and the sale of BTC by the German and US governments causing downward pressure, but VCs continue to bet on the crypto market.
As of July 2, 2024, the funding obtained by crypto projects exceeded $160 million. One of the most prominent projects is Sentient, which secured $85 million, accounting for half of the total funding.
The $85 million funding for Sentient has two notable features. Firstly, it is a seed round of funding, jokingly referred to by netizens as “redefining the seed round.” Secondly, the investors are exceptional, with prominent Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund leading, along with Pantera Capital and Framework Ventures, as well as other well-known VCs (Ethereal Ventures, Robot Ventures, Symbolic Capital, Delphi Ventures, Hack VC, Arrington Capital, Primitive Ventures, IDG Capital, Sky9 Capital, HashKey Capital).
So, what is Sentient and why has it attracted such massive investments from top VCs?
According to the Sentient Foundation, Sentient is an AI research organization dedicated to building a new Open AGI economy for AI builders and creators. Sentient is building a platform and protocols to enable open-source AI developers to (1) monetize their models, data, and other innovations, (2) collaborate to build powerful AI, and (3) become significant stakeholders in the new Open AGI economy.
Sentient believes that the dominant position of closed-source AI in the AI field concentrates enormous power in few organizations. While open-source AI exists, it lacks sufficient incentives for developers, and its performance cannot match or surpass closed-source AI. Sentient envisions a future where AI development is open and transparent, with access and monetization being decentralized.
Sentient’s technical details are scant based on the disclosed information, with only a few rough concepts. Sentient will build an AI platform where AI developers are the main contributors and participants. They will rely on the underlying blockchain and incentive mechanisms to provide economic coordination for achieving Open AGI. The AI models hosted on Sentient are “open, monetizable, and loyal” (OML), and OML models will drive the shared Open AGI economy, supporting millions of AI agents and billions of downstream AI users.
According to Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon and AggLayer, Sentient will be built on Polygon Agglayer. The core team of Sentient includes Sandeep Nailwal, Sreeram Kannan, Pramod Viswanath, and Himanshu Tyagi, who have already achieved great success in the crypto industry and academia, leading to massive investments from top VCs.
After the seed round funding announcement for Sentient, VC leaders who participated in the investment shared their thoughts. They emphasized Sentient’s focus on hosting open-source models that anyone can verify and build while combining cryptographic incentive measures to protect capital expenditure and value. They believe that Sentient is ambitious and its success would be significant in the AI community.
In conclusion, the investment in Sentient is mainly focused on the team, with the goal of revolutionizing the economics of open and closed-source AI. The project aims to embed cryptographic technology in learning management systems to ensure that models cannot be used without payment, leading to what they call “model loyalty.” This ambitious research challenge has the potential to revolutionize the economics of open-source AI models and strengthen incentives for their development.
In sum, Sentient’s technology paves the way for a new era of AI by promoting open-source, community-governed AGI methods, enhancing innovation, collaboration, and transparency, and challenging the standards for ethical AI development and deployment. It represents a significant shift towards decentralization, transparency, and collective ownership principles in the AI space, aiming to ensure that open AI can compete with closed AI in the long run.