TLDR

• Peter Thiel says it’s “very strange” that 80-85% of money in AI is being made by one company, Nvidia.
• Thiel’s Founders Fund co-led an $85 million seed round for open-source AI platform Sentient.
• Sentient aims to compete with OpenAI by allowing community contributions to AI models.
• The platform will be built on Polygon, with Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal as a core contributor.
• Sentient’s goal is to address concerns about AI concentration in the hands of a few tech giants.

Peter Thiel, co-founder of Palantir Technologies and prominent venture capitalist, has raised eyebrows in the tech world with his recent comments on artificial intelligence (AI) and his firm’s significant investment in a new open-source AI platform.

Speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Thiel drew parallels between the current AI boom and the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s.

He pointed out an aspect of the current AI landscape: the dominance of a single company in terms of profitability.

“Currently, 80-85% of the money in AI is being made by one company, Nvidia,” Thiel stated, describing this concentration as “very strange.”

Thiel’s observations come at a time when Nvidia’s market capitalization has soared to over $3 trillion, making it one of the most valuable companies in the world. The chip giant’s dominance in the AI hardware space has been a driving force behind its unprecedented growth.

However, Thiel’s concerns about concentration in the AI industry are not limited to hardware.

His venture capital firm, Founders Fund, has taken a significant step to address the broader issue of AI development being controlled by a handful of tech giants.

Sentient aims to democratize AI development by allowing community contributions to AI models. This approach stands in stark contrast to the closed systems of companies like OpenAI, which limit user access to their underlying models.

Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon and one of Sentient’s core contributors, explained the project’s mission:

“By building an open platform for AGI development, we aim to ensure that the benefits of AI are distributed equitably and that its development aligns with the interests of humanity as a whole.”

The platform will be built on Polygon, representing an expansion of the Ethereum scaling solution into the AI space. This integration of blockchain technology with AI development could potentially address some of the incentive problems in open-source AI, where contributors often go unrewarded for their work.

Sentient plans to launch “campaigns” for contributors, with specific metrics for evaluating contributions and rewards. These rewards may include co-ownership of the AI models created and future rewards based on their usage. While the project currently has no plans for a token, this could change as the community grows.

The seed round, which closed in May, was co-led by Pantera Capital and Framework Ventures, with participation from several other high-profile investors. Joey Krug, partner at Founders Fund, highlighted the potential of Sentient’s approach:

“Currently, anyone is able to just copy models without paying for them, and Sentient aims to solve this incentive problem which disincentivizes open source AI.”

Sentient is expected to launch its testnet in the third quarter of this year. The substantial seed funding will be used to continue building the platform and attract top talent in AI research and blockchain engineering.