1/ We @panteracapital co-led the $85 million seed round for @sentient_agi, an organization aiming to create the first community-built open Artificial General Intelligence
open.substack.com/pub/veradiverdict/p/open-agi
Let’s learn about how Sentient is building towards this vision. 🔍🧵
2/ Over the past few years, two new holistic problems in AI development have emerged:
• Resource management: AI development is not cost-scalable
• Incentive alignment: AI is made for people, but its development and rewards are decided in boardrooms
3/ Companies have identified the symptoms and tried addressing them by defining their niche. Mixtral is open source, Bittensor rewards model performance, and OpenAI is centralized and multimodal. But none have looked at the holistic issues.
4/ Sentient understands the necessary scale of change, reinventing AI from the ground up. The Sentient team calls this OML, which stands for open (models available to be made and used by anyone), monetizable (model owners can sign off on model use), and loyal (controlled by the commons/DAO).
5/ In OML 1.0, Sentient invented a cryptographic primitive that takes advantage of a flaw in AI systems; AI models can be “backdoored” by injecting poisoned training data that will, with a high likelihood, produce outputs that follow predictable patterns. These have minimal impact on model performance.
6/ These “fingerprints” allow the usage of AI models to be tracked and permissioned, something previously impossible. This lends itself perfectly to decentralization; the creators of AI models have complete control over their own models’ use, and the blockchain allows any user to directly pay model owners for its use.
7/ Creating an AI-driven economy means ensuring equitable access and opportunities for everyone to participate and be rewarded. The next generation of models should be funded, used, and owned by the people in ways that are fair, responsible, and aligned with the interests of its users, not an executive committee.
8/ The team is perfectly positioned to execute this vision, with talent coming from Google, Deepmind, Polygon, Princeton, the University of Washington, and more:
• @viswanathpramod, Research, Forrest G. Hamrick Professor of Engineering at Princeton University, Co-Inventor of 4G
• @hstyagi, Technology, Professor of Engineering at the Indian Institute of Science
• @sandeepnailwal, Strategy, Founder at Polygon
• @0xkenzi, Growth, Co-founder of Symbolic Capital
END/ We are excited to invest alongside @foundersfund, @joeykrug, @pythianism, @hiFramework, @DoveyWan, and dozens of other funds. AI will increasingly dominate our lives, and Sentient’s vision of aligning AI models’ interests with its users is one we believe in.