Professional translation:
CoinWorld reported:
In recent days, the open-source artificial intelligence development platform Sentient announced the completion of an $85 million seed round of financing, aiming to break the dominant position of centralized AI model development in the industry. This huge financing has attracted the attention of many market participants.
According to reports, this round of financing was jointly led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Pantera Capital, and Framework Ventures, with other investors including Ethereal Ventures, Robot Ventures, Symbolic Capital, and Delphi Ventures.
With $85 million in seed funding, what is Sentient’s background?
1. Backed by a top team:
One of Sentient’s core contributors is Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon. Sentient’s advisor is Sreeram Kannan, founder and CEO of EigenLayer.
2. Backed by Ethereum:
The Sentient platform will be built on Polygon, which means Ethereum is expanding into the AI field.
3. Disruptive technological concept:
Competing directly with OpenAI, Sentient aims to create a decentralized Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) platform that incentivizes people to collaborate, build, replicate, and scale AI models using blockchain technology, and rewards contributors.
These three irresistible advantages are gradually becoming evident, showcasing the value of Sentient.
Highlight 1: Created by tech guru Sandeep Nailwal
One of Sentient’s core contributors is Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon.
People who experienced the previous bull market are certainly familiar with this “millionaire” of the Web3 version slum. He left the slums of Madrid and led the “hoof” to upgrade to the Ethereum Layer 2 aggregator, Polygon, becoming the biggest dark horse in the cryptocurrency market at the time, creating a market value of billions of dollars.
This is a very inspiring story, and Polygon’s current position in the public chain top ten is closely related to Sandeep Nailwal’s values.
Born in the slums of India, Sandeep has always had the motivation to escape this life. He wanted to become someone important and disliked playing small games. He hated failure.
These values have accompanied Sandeep throughout his life until he created MATIC Network. At that time, in 2017, people were very enthusiastic about the first initial coin offering (ICO).
As long as there was a white paper, even without a product, they could raise funds. Many projects failed after financing.
After launching MATIC Network with JD Kanani and Anurag Arjun in India, the team could easily raise $20 million, but they didn’t do it because taking shortcuts and making quick money went against Sandeep’s idea of becoming someone important.
Sandeep responded, “Matic is solving a long-term problem, so we have to choose a slower growth approach. If we had obtained a large amount of funding early on, it might have limited our development and vision.” In the end, they chose to raise limited funds, $5 million from Binance, and spend more time polishing the product.
In conclusion, in addition to the team’s keen entrepreneurial sense and strong technical capabilities, Sandeep’s spirit is undoubtedly an indispensable stabilizer in the process of Polygon’s success, and it will definitely bring more than just technological advancements to Sentient.
Highlight 2: Leading Ethereum into the hottest AI narrative
Polygon is open and powerful, with a mission to expand Ethereum and allow more users to access crypto.
In terms of functionality, Polygon aims to create an Ethereum-compatible multi-chain ecosystem that uses a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism to process on-chain transactions and obtain security from Ethereum.
This allows blockchain networks to connect and scale, hence being 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 evolved into a comprehensive set of scaling solutions and was renamed Polygon. Later, Polygon acquired a bunch of zk technologies and now focuses on achieving Ethereum’s unified liquidity and infinite scalability through AggLayer and CDK.
The AI field has already shown significant sensitivity to Polygon. In June 2023, Polygon launched Polygon Copilot, and later released another AI tool, Brain.
In comparison, Brain is more comprehensive and can deploy contracts through AI. On April 19, 2024, the highly anticipated AI project Ora Protocol announced that its on-chain AI oracle was integrating with Polygon PoS, allowing developers to build AI-driven dApps using Ora Protocol oracles to break the limitations of smart contracts with AI and richer data sources.
Can Polygon support a massive AI narrative? The answer is affirmative. Based on Polygon’s aggregation architecture, it can have hundreds of thousands of chains, all connected to a single layer with Ethereum’s security, aiming to achieve an infinitely scalable blockchain network.
These chains will focus on different fields such as DeFi, gaming NFTs, and AI projects. For example, Sentient is a project built on the Polygon CDK chain. Specific chains and ecosystems will focus on building applications for specific industries, creating a blueprint for Polygon in the decentralized world.
A significant limitation to open AI is cost, including training and data collection costs.
Sandeep has openly expressed his views on this matter: these cost issues can be solved through token incentives, such as the tokenization of models. Polygon will have multiple attempts in this regard.
In addition, there have been various attempts at decentralized computing, such as the DePIN infrastructure for AI computing.
While decentralized solutions may address supply issues, AI demand remains high but supply is limited. However, decentralized providers may not necessarily replace centralized providers, as the latter may have advantages in coordination and performance.
Highlight 3: Open-source AI to compete with tech giants like Google
Finding long-term decentralized alternatives to entities like OpenAI that provide AI services is a pain point of the AI era.
Firstly, why does AI need to be open-source? We all know that the development of artificial intelligence is fast-paced and has the potential to change many aspects of human life. However, if these technologies are controlled by a few companies, there are significant risks.
Secondly, why is a decentralized alternative needed? Currently, the development of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is mainly carried out secretly by large companies due to their abundant resources.
This closed approach means that all model parameters and variables cannot be inspected, verified, or distributed by the outside world and are completely controlled by these companies.
This is also Sandeep’s concern, which led to the idea of developing AGI through a decentralized open platform to ensure the fair distribution of AI’s benefits and development processes that align with everyone’s interests.
To address these issues, Sentient was born.
Imagine an AI platform that is open and open-source, allowing people to collaborate and contribute to AI models through blockchain technology and be rewarded for their contributions.
This is what Sentient aims to do, focusing on building open-source AI models through community contributions to address the centralization and security and ethical concerns in the AI field.
Furthermore, its goal is to directly compete with OpenAI and differentiate itself through its community-driven approach.
Unlike OpenAI, which restricts users from directly accessing its models, Sentient will allow users to access the models, contribute to them, and reward contributors.
Sentient’s reward mechanism is implemented through “activities,” each with specific metrics to evaluate contributions and provide rewards.
If achieved, Sentient will solve the core problem hindering the development of open-source AI: incentive mechanisms.
Currently, on open-source AI platforms, anyone can freely copy models without paying any fees.
Sentient plans to enter the testnet phase this quarter and plans to use this round of financing to expand its team and hire experts.
Risk Warning:
Sentient’s token incentive model is not yet fully formed and is one of the core structures of the project. If the incentive mechanism is not good enough, the core problem hindering the development of open-source AI will not be effectively resolved.
The project is still in its early stages, with no mature products currently available, the testnet has not been launched, and the community size is small, resulting in significant uncertainty. Users are advised to wait for further information disclosure or project progress before interacting.
Given the limited information and lack of project progress at present, it is advisable to exercise caution when clicking on websites and Discord links below Twitter posts to protect your funds’ security.
Summary:
The rapid development of AI has brought humanity to a crossroads of two future worlds. One path leads to a closed world dominated by a few large companies and closed-source models. The other path leads to an open world where models are open-source by default, with transparent and verifiable inferences.
This open world is the ideal future we envision, and this vision can only be realized through blockchain technology, making artificial intelligence fairer and more transparent.
Each bull market brings forth a group of thriving public chains, and when the bull market ends, another group quietly exits the stage. We look forward to Sentient leading Polygon and Ethereum towards a deeper future.
