Sentient, a pioneer of decentralized artificial intelligence, says it’s going to bring incredibly powerful AI-powered search and reasoning capabilities to the masses by open-sourcing its upcoming Open Deep Search framework.
Known as ODS, the software is designed to power Sentient’s decentralized generative AI chatbot, Sentient Chat, and will be soon made available to every AI developer – a move that could see it integrated into hundreds of new AI applications.
It’s an enticing prospect because numerous benchmark test results show that ODS is an incredibly powerful AI search framework, capable of outperforming the insanely-popular Perplexity AI search application and rival offerings from the likes of OpenAI and others.
Sentient first unveiled ODS over a year ago at the Open AGI Summit at ETH Denver in February 2024. In a paper published on Arxiv, it revealed it was able to beat Perplexity’s AI search model on the FRAME benchmark, which measures the ability of AI to answer multi-releasing questions. ODS also performed extremely well in SimpleQA benchmarks that assess its ability to answer simpler questions with direct, factual responses, matching the capabilities of OpenAI search.
Sentient, which is backed by more than $85 million in funding from investors including Peter Thiel’s Founder’s Fund, Pantera Capital and Framework Ventures, is led by former Polygon Co-Founder Sandeep Nailwal and Banyan Intelligence founder Himanshu Tyagi. The startup is on a mission to democratize access to AI, and that explains why it’s planning to make the entire codebase for ODS available to the open-source community within the next couple of months.
When it’s released, ODS will provide Web3 developers with a powerful framework to underpin highly sophisticated AI applications with unprecedented reasoning abilities.
But before then, it will make ODS available through its very own chatbot, Sentient Chat, which is a decentralized AI service that’s currently available in early access. With more than 1.75 million users on its waitlist, Sentient Chat is set to become the most widely-used decentralized AI platform in history.
According to Sentient, the capabilities of ODS provide the most definitive proof so far that decentralized and open-source AI solutions can not only compete, but actually surpass those of proprietary, closed-source AI systems.
What’s impressive is that Sentient was able to develop ODS on an extremely tight budget of just several million dollars – an order of magnitude less than the billions of dollars available to companies like OpenAI and Google. Once ODS is made available, it promises to level the playing field dramatically, paving the way for any developer to create AI applications and services that can compete with those developed by the best-funded big tech companies.
Tyagi said the open-sourcing of ODS means that Sentient is throwing down the gauntlet to AI industry leaders, while giving independent developers the freedom to build applications they could previously only dream about.
“ODS is a testament to what’s possible when innovation meets decentralization, rather than being gatekept by billion-dollar budgets,” he said.
Sentient said it will slowly unleash the full capabilities of ODS via weekly feature updates in Sentient Chat, while gradually expanding access at the same time. It’s aiming to fully open-source ODS within the next two months.
