Article: Biteye Core Contributor Viee
Editor: Biteye Core Contributor Crush
In the past few 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 substantial financing has attracted the attention of many in the market.
According to disclosures, the 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, Delphi Ventures, and others.
01 What's the Background of Sentient with an $85 Million Seed Round?
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.
Supported by Ethereum: The Sentient platform will be built on Polygon, which means that Ethereum is expanding into the AI field.
Disruptive Technological Concept: Competing directly with OpenAI, Sentient aims to create a decentralized Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) platform, incentivizing collaboration, construction, replication, and expansion of AI models through blockchain technology, and rewarding contributors.
These three undeniable advantages are gradually demonstrating the value of Sentient.
02 Highlight One: Created by Tech Giant Sandeep Nailwal
One of Sentient's core contributors is Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon.
Those who experienced the previous bull market are certainly familiar with this "millionaire" of the Web3 version of the slum in Madrid. He led the transformation of "Matic" into the Ethereum Layer 2 aggregator, becoming a dark horse in the cryptocurrency market at the time, creating a market value of tens of billions of dollars.
This is a very inspiring story. Polygon's current position in the public chain is closely related to Sandeep Nailwal's values.
Growing up in the slums of India, Sandeep was surrounded by classmates who dropped out of school, some of whom even indulged in alcohol and gambling. Throughout his upbringing, he was motivated to escape this kind of life. He wanted to become someone important, not play small games, and hated failure.
This value system has always accompanied Sandeep, until he created MATIC Network. At that time, in 2017, people were very enthusiastic about the initial coin offering (ICO).
Many projects failed after raising funds, even without a product, as long as they had a white paper.
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 contradicted Sandeep's vision of being important.
Sandeep responded, "Matic is solving a long-term problem, so we had to choose a slower growth path. If we had received a large amount of funding early on, it might have limited our development and vision." In the end, they chose to raise a limited amount of funds—$5 million from Binance—and spent more time refining the product.
In conclusion, in addition to the team's keen entrepreneurial instincts and strong technical capabilities, Sandeep's spirit is definitely an indispensable stabilizer in the process of Polygon's success, and will surely bring more than just technical expertise to Sentient.
03 Highlight Two: Leading Ethereum into the Hottest AI Narrative
Polygon is open and powerful, with a mission to expand Ethereum and bring more users into the world of 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 allows blockchain networks to connect and scale, hence being called the "Internet of blockchains." In simple terms, Polygon makes Ethereum faster, more convenient, and cheaper.
Polygon's predecessor was Matic Network, initially a PoS chain that evolved into a comprehensive scaling solution and was later rebranded as Polygon. Later, Polygon acquired a bunch of zk technologies and is now focused on achieving Ethereum's unified liquidity and infinite scalability through AggLayer and CDK.
At the onset of this bull market, AI has become one of the most talked-about topics and a new narrative for established public chains.
Sentient announced that it will be built on Polygon, which also means that Ethereum will make a mark in the AI field. In fact, Polygon has shown remarkable sensitivity in the AI field early on. In June 2023, it launched Polygon Copilot, followed by another AI tool, Brain.
In comparison, Brain has more comprehensive functionality and can deploy contracts through AI. On April 19, 2024, the highly anticipated AI project Ora Protocol announced that its on-chain AI oracle is integrating with Polygon PoS, allowing developers to build AI-driven dApps using Ora Protocol's oracle 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 tens of thousands of chains, all connected to a single layer with Ethereum's security, aiming to achieve an infinitely growing blockchain network.
These chains will focus on different areas such as DeFi, NFT gaming, 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.
To open up AI, a major limitation is cost, including training and data collection costs.
Sandeep has publicly expressed his views on this: through cryptographic incentives, these cost issues can be solved through open sourcing, such as the need for tokenized models, which Polygon will have various attempts at.
In addition, decentralized computing, such as the DePIN infrastructure for AI computing, has had various attempts.
AI demand is high but supply is limited. Although decentralized solutions may solve the supply problem, they may not necessarily replace centralized providers, as the latter may be superior in coordination and performance.
04 Highlight Three: Open-Source AI, Competing with Disruptive Concepts and Tech Giants like Google
Finding a long-term decentralized alternative for entities like OpenAI that provide AI services is a pain point in the AI era.
Firstly, why does AI need to be open-source? We all know that the development speed of artificial intelligence is very fast and has the potential to change many aspects of human life, but if these technologies are controlled by a few companies, there will be great risks.
Next, why is a decentralized alternative needed? Today, the development of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is mainly conducted in secret by large companies because they have abundant resources.
This closed approach results in all model parameters and variables being unable to be inspected, verified, or distributed by outsiders, completely controlled by these companies.
This is also Sandeep's concern, which led to the idea of developing AGI through the establishment of a decentralized open platform, ensuring the fair distribution of the benefits of AI and that the development process aligns with the interests of everyone.
To address these issues, Sentient was born.
Imagine an open and open-source AI platform that allows collaboration and incentivizes people to build and expand AI models through blockchain technology, with participants receiving rewards.
This is what Sentient aims to do, dedicated to building open-source AI models through community contributions to address the centralization and ethical security issues in the current AI field.
In addition, its goal is to compete directly with OpenAI and differentiate itself through its community-based 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 implemented through "activities," each with specific metrics used to evaluate contributions and provide rewards.
If achieved, Sentient will solve the core problem hindering the development of open-source AI: the incentive mechanism.
Currently, on open-source AI platforms, anyone can freely replicate models without paying fees.
Sentient plans to enter the testnet phase this quarter and intends to use this round of financing to expand the team, hire experts, and more.
05 Risk Warning
Sentient's token incentive model is not yet fully developed, which is one of the core structures of the project. If the incentive mechanism is not sufficient, the core problem hindering the development of open-source AI may not be effectively addressed.
The project is in its early stages, with no mature products currently, the testnet has not been launched, and the community is small, leading to significant uncertainty. It is recommended that users wait for further disclosures or project progress before engaging.
With limited information at present and no project progress, caution is advised when clicking on websites and Discord links under Twitter to protect financial security.
06 Conclusion
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, and reasoning is transparent and verifiable.
This open world is our ideal future, and it can only be achieved through blockchain technology, making artificial intelligence fairer and more transparent.
Each bull market brings a group of promising public chains, and when the bull market ends, another group quietly exits the stage. We look forward to Sentient leading Polygon and Ethereum into a deeper future.
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