Sentient To Bring Powerful AI Search To The Masses

The decentralized artificial intelligence startup Sentient says it’s throwing down the gauntlet to industry giants like OpenAI, Google, Perplexity and
The decentralized artificial intelligence startup Sentient says it’s throwing down the gauntlet to industry giants like OpenAI, Google, Perplexity and Anthropic with the imminent launch of Open Deep Search.

Known as ODS, it’s a very soon-to-be open-source AI search framework that utilizes advanced “reasoning” skills to search the web for information and answer complex questions and solve sophisticated problems in the same way as the most intelligent humans do, only it can do it much faster.

The company plans to bring ODS to the masses in its upcoming Sentient Chat tool, which is a free-to-use generative AI application that’s built as a decentralized alternative to ChatGPT. It will follow by making the entire code available as an open-source application, putting it into the hands of third-party developers to power a new generation of more sophisticated applications that can use AI reasoning.

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It’s an exciting development because ODS has shown through a number of tests that it’s one of the most capable AI search frameworks in the business, surpassing Perplexity AI’s most powerful Sonar Reasoning Pro model on the FRAMES benchmark, which tests the advanced reasoning of AI models. It has also demonstrated an ability to respond accurately to simpler questions with reliable and accurate answers on a par with OpenAI’s best models.

Sentient, which was co-founded by Polygon’s Sandeep Nailwal and Himanshu Tyagi of Banyan Intelligence, says its mission is to make advanced AI technology available to the masses by pioneering a decentralized approach to model development. By using open-source technologies and datasets and collaborating with the wider AI research community, it was able to develop ODS at a fraction of the cost of proprietary AI reasoning models such as OpenAI’s o1.

Users of the Sentient Chat application will be the first to experience ODS first-hand, and they can expect to do so in the coming weeks. The company has promised to slowly roll out ODS’s capabilities in a series of weekly updates to the app, which is currently available in early access and has more than 1.75 million users on its waitlist. It’s hoping to make Sentient Chat generally available within the next two months, when it will also open-source the codebase of ODS.

ODS is eagerly anticipated after dazzling more than 1,500 attendees who got a first look at it during last year’s Open AGI Summit, which took place on the sidelines of the ETH Denver conference in February 2024. Along with the likes of China’s DeepSeek, it’s yet another example of how open-source technologies can compete with proprietary alternatives,

When it’s released, it promises to be a game-changer for independent AI developers, as they’ll be able to use it as the foundation of a new wave of low-cost applications that can access the most advanced AI reasoning functionalities, supporting many previously-impossible use cases.

“The release of Open Deep Search is a milestone in our mission to make AI accessible to everyone,” Tyagi said. “Open-sourcing a framework that outperforms industry leaders like Perplexity throws down the gauntlet to closed-source AI developers while giving developers access to a powerful primitive that frees them to create the applications they’ve always dreamed of.”

To date, Sentient has raised more than $85 million in venture capital funding from backers including Peter Thiel’s Founder’s Fund, Framework Ventures and Pantera Capital.