With the once-distant advent of artificial general intelligence (AGI) and the singularity suddenly years rather than decades away, AI developers Sentient believes that the time has come to establish a “new form of property rights” and create an open AI platform to ensure that the technology remains accessible to all.
“The rapid advances in AI have the potential to transform every aspect of our lives, but the concentration of power in the hands of a few centralized entities poses significant risks,” said Polygon co-founder and senior contributor to Sentient. Sandeep Nailwal he said in a statement. “By building an open platform for AGI development, we aim to ensure that the benefits of AI are distributed equitably and that its development is in line with the interests of humanity as a whole.”
To achieve this goal, Sentient announced Tuesday that it has raised $85 million in seed funding to develop its platform, hire AI research and blockchain engineering experts, and partner with leading academic institutions and industry players. The round was co-led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Pantera Capital, and Framework Ventures.
Sentient based in San Francisco provides an open source platform for AI research and development with the goal of «align AI innovations toward open, community-built AGI.”
AGI is still a theoretical milestone, where artificial intelligence rivals or surpasses human intelligence in all fields of knowledge.
“Few companies control access to these services, both the knowledge and the model itself, but also how they deliver AI to the rest of the world,” said Sentient’s senior contributor. Pramod Viswanath said Decipher“Even governments can agree that this kind of concentration of AI in a few companies is really dangerous.
“On the other hand, artificial intelligence is a technology that many people can contribute to,” he added.
Whether AI remains safe and aligned with human interests is a major concern for the entire industry and global leaders, and it has been the cause of corporate turmoil at OpenAI.
Viswanath, who is also a professor of engineering at Princeton University, emphasizes a balanced approach to AI development. The goal is not rigid decentralization, he explained, but rather the fair distribution of power through respect for property rights and aligned incentives.
“AI is very shake and bake, it really benefits from diversity of opinion,” Viswanath said. “But in some parts, we don’t care about diversity and decentralization, like inference.”
Inference is the process used by AI models to draw conclusions about new data, a task that requires a lot of computing power.
“It’s hard enough to do inference on a GPU with a big cluster on a cloud, and to do it on a decentralized cloud? Oh my god,” he said.
While acknowledging the practical difficulties of decentralizing some AI processes, Viswanath argued that ensuring community ownership and returning economic value to contributions is critical.
“This is the emergence of a new form of property rights in AI that need to be broadly defined, respected and understood,” Viswanath said.
Other investors who participated in the seed round include Ethereal, Robot Ventures, Symbolic Capital, Dao5, Delphi, Primitive Ventures, Nomad, Hack VC, Arrington Capital, Hypersphere, IDG, Topology, Protagonist, Folius, Sky9, Canonical Crypto, Dispersion Capital, Mirana, Foresight, HashKey, and Spartan.
By Ryan Ozawa.
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