San Francisco, California, February 6th, 2025, Chainwire
Sentient has completed one of the biggest-ever minting campaigns in the history of crypto with 650,000 participants. The mint offers participants the opportunity to gain partial ownership of Dobby, the world’s first Loyal AI model, through the distribution of an NFT. With the NFT, users can later claim model ownership and model fingerprints.
Sentient’s groundbreaking engagement rate coincides with the rise of DeepSeek, an AI model rivaling OpenAI’s performance while being built on a $6M budget and minimal GPUs. Open-source and efficient enough to run on smartphones, DeepSeek’s debut has fueled market turbulence, impacting AI stocks and crypto tokens.
Sentient’s innovative fingerprinting technology represents a breakthrough in AI model training and ownership. These unique digital signatures enable communities to verify model identity and enforce ownership over openly distributed models. The launch follows Sentient’s completion of an $85 million seed round co-led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund.
Fingerprinting a model embeds a query response pair directly into the AI model. The same fingerprinted query will always have the same response by the AI model, this helps the community identify the model and call out any illegitimate use. Sentient has created this tamper-resistant mechanism to prove the legitimacy of use and prevent misappropriation. The fingerprinting campaign advances Sentient’s vision of Loyal AI: artificial intelligence that is fully decentralized and community-controlled.
While other companies focus on AI agents, Sentient prioritizes core decentralization and open-source models. By embedding loyalty into the AI “brain”, Sentient ensures alignment with the communities’ principles, building trust and integrity at the foundation.
Participants in the fingerprinting campaign will share ownership of Dobby, Sentient’s debut Loyal AI model. The distributed NFT will allow users to claim model ownership and model fingerprints. These fingerprints act as keys to the model’s unique identity, enabling holders to verify legitimate use and enforce ownership. The campaign sets a precedent for decentralizing the power and control of advanced AI systems.
Sandeep Nailwal, Polygon founder and Sentient core contributor, said: “When AGI or ASI emerges it should be community-controlled and community-owned to guarantee its loyalty. Sentient’s fingerprinting mechanism allows communities to enforce ownership, control and alignment of open-source AI models. This incentivizes communities to come together and build high quality open-source models. In the long run, the goal is to make sure that instead of some large institution having exclusive control over a closed-source AGI, AGI is open-source and owned by everyone individually and collectively.”
To claim the NFT, participants must prove both their humanity and intelligence by passing a randomized IQ test. This rigorous minting process, which attracted over 650,000 participants, has already made history as one of the largest NFT campaigns ever by user engagement. Beyond ownership, these NFTs grant users exclusive access to the fingerprinted model, creating a direct link between the community and the AI they’ve helped shape.
Sentient’s mission extends far beyond Dobby. As the organization redefines the future of AI, it remains steadfast in its belief that the current trajectory of centralized, corporate-controlled AI development is unsustainable. Sentient’s vision for Loyal AI challenges this status quo, championing a transparent, community-driven approach to artificial general intelligence (AGI).
Updates on the fingerprinting campaign will be shared on Sentient’s X account and Discord.
About Sentient
Sentient is pioneering a new era in AI, empowering communities to create Loyal AI that is community-built, community-aligned, and community-owned. As a non-profit committed to advancing open-source AI technologies and building a decentralized, transparent ecosystem, Sentient champions an Open AI economy where AI builders are key stakeholders. With AGI on the horizon, its mission is to ensure it serves humanity, not corporations.
Learn more: https://sentient.foundation/
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