AI firm Sentient Labs, founded by Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal and backed by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, is preparing to launch Open Deep Search (ODS), a new framework designed to rival closed-source AI search products such as Perplexity.
ODS aims to boost Sentient Chat’s capabilities, with Sentient co-founder Himanshu Tyagi telling Blockworks that the “goal is to have all these different agents which are building on our models to be integrated there.”
It’s currently limited to select testers, though a full public release is expected in the next few months.
Sentient Chat is the platform in which users can “experience not only our models, but all the applications built on model collecting.”
“That’s why we have both these things going, but our value proposition is just models. So our claim is that even though great models … may come, we are in a sort of age of abundance for the next one to two years, especially because of this very interesting geopolitical play.”
The team designed ODS to be owned by the community, which means it can be modified and allows developers to “build domain-specific plug-ins, private search agents and alternative reward mechanisms,” the press release added.
Sentient is focused on building “loyal” AI models, such as its flagship model Dobby.
When scored against a benchmark called FRAMES, Sentient’s accuracy was higher than both Perplexity’s Sonar Reasoning Pro and GPT-4o Search Preview, according to a press release.
The team wants to make AI more accessible across the board through decentralization. Tyagi told Blockworks that he’s “absolutely” bullish on the intersection of AI and crypto.
“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,” Tyagi said.
Decentralization is key, he added, because it’s hard to know what centralized entities are missing in terms of data.
“I am very bullish on decentralizing data sources itself” because it solves the problem, he explained.
While some have compared Sentient to Perplexity, Tyagi dismissed this, saying Sentient doesn’t have a direct competitor. Rather, he says the team is more focused on building models.
Currently, there’s a waitlist of nearly two million for Sentient Chat, and roughly 700,000 users of its loyal AI model Dobby.
