Sentient, which has raised $85 million, said it has reached the ceiling of India-China cooperation and wants to build a decentralized Hugging Face

On the evening of July 2, the open source AI platform Sentient completed a seed round of financing of 85 million US dollars. This should be the largest amount of financing for a crypto AI project announced this year. There are so many seed rounds, not to mention the recent bad market, even in the bull market, there are few.

The investors are also extremely luxurious, with Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, Pantera Capital and Framework Ventures co-leading the investment, and Ethereal Ventures, Robot Ventures, Foresight Ventures, Symbolic Capital, Delphi Ventures, Hack VC, Arrington Capital, HashKey Capital and a bunch of famous and unknown VCs participating in the investment.

It stands to reason that such a great project should have been well-known before, but this is the first time I have heard of this project. I went into the project Discord and saw that there were only more than 100 people. I was relieved, because no one paid attention to this project before.

It doesn’t matter if no one pays attention to it. This project must have some amazing things that make VC willing to pay money! With this idea in mind, I opened the project official website again.

Hmm, did I click on the wrong website? For a project that has raised so much money, the foundation website is built with Notion. Once again, I have raised the lower limit of my understanding of VC projects. After the shock, let’s take a closer look at the product roadmap.

Short-term goals:

· Community-created AI development resource management system (similar to Hugging Face)

· Blockchain protocol for trading AI development resources (a new chain based on Polygon CDK)

· Carry out the first activity with the community

Medium-term goals:

· Develop the OML file format standard (OML is a new concept created by Sentient, which means openness, monetization and loyalty. Sentient wants to develop such a model)

· AI services provided by the Sentient community (that is, models can be run on Sentient)

· AI resource usage tracking system based on signature network (that is, the underlying blockchain protocol can record the usage of AI models or data sets)

· Launch multiple AICs for joint construction (that is, promote several ecological projects)

Long-term goals:

· New basic models built by community contributors (let AI companies open source models on it)

· Open AGI supported by the OML model (yes, it wants to compete with OpenAI for who develops AGI first)

· Incentive and monetization mechanism for the new AI developer economy

Since it is a goal, it means that none of these things are available now. At present, it is just a PPT financing.

After looking around, doesn't Sentient want to make a Hugging Face with an underlying blockchain protocol and an economic incentive layer? Hugging Face is an open source platform for AI, where users can publish and share pre-trained models, data sets, and demo files. It provides a complete AI development ecosystem and has become the world's most popular open source machine learning community and platform.

As for the plan on Sentient's official website, ChatGPT should be able to write it. Are VCs stupid and don't look at fundamentals to raise so much money that others can't? Of course not. This year's endless high FDV/low circulation magic disks have educated every simple leek.

VCs can give so much money, of course, they are coming for Sandeep Nailwal, one of the four core contributors of Sentient. Nailwal is the co-founder of Polygon, a top Indian Web3 platform. Among the four core contributors, there are two Indian faces, Pramod Viswanath and Himanshu Tyagi, who should have been brought in by him to keep the show going.

As for Sensys, it is a startup founded by Kenzi Wang, co-founder of Symbolic Capital. It should also be the developer and main contributor of the Sentient AI platform. The official website also has a few PPTs, which probably tells you "Coming soon".

Kenzi Wang was previously the vice president and general manager of Huobi Global. In 2017, he founded AU21 Capital with Guo Hongcai (Bao Erye). "AU stands for great founders who invest in Asia and the United States, and 21 stands for 21 million BTC." In 2019, he and Sandeep Nailwal met at Binance Labs, and later invested in Polygon Labs and founded Symbolic Capital together.

After a thorough review, Sentient is simply the ceiling-level project of Indian-Chinese cooperation. The blank webpage opened up the vision and imagination of various VCs, making them scramble to become a part of Sentient's first round of financing as if they were seeing a delicacy.

Many people say that you can't see anything in the early stage of a project, and you can only see whether the founder is awesome. Investing in a project has been simplified to investing in the founder. Sandeep Nailwal was already a successful founder of a project with a market value of tens of billions. He has set up a more imaginative new situation. Who would not be willing to get involved?

What these foreign VCs don't know is that the same thing has already happened in China. The lesson is not far away. Wang Huiwen, the second in command of Meituan, also quickly raised $300 million in financing without a complete technical solution or any products. In less than half a year, it was hastily acquired by Meituan. History has always repeatedly verified a saying: few projects born with a silver spoon in their mouths can make it to the end.

However, VCs may have no choice. How can they give an explanation if they don’t deploy so much money from LPs? Moreover, even if this project is ruined in the end, the VCs who gathered in the early stage can get out of it unscathed. They know that although retail investors are shouting that they will not take over, their bodies will always come to see if there is an opportunity to take advantage of the airdrop.

Although the future is unknown, perhaps we can try to look at Sentient more tolerantly. After all, AI is a very difficult and competitive track, and the companies in this track may determine the future of our human beings. No one wants the future to be controlled by giants like OpenAI, Google and Meta.

Top founders and lavish investments give Sentient, a new decentralized AI platform, at least a better chance of surviving and competing with the giants of Web2. Perhaps Sandeep Nailwal's bold crossover and the mindless FOMO of various VCs will really create a more OML (open, monetizable, and loyal) AI development landscape for us.

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