650K users join Sentient Dobby to decentralise AI ownership

Sentient has concluded a record-breaking NFT minting event, with over 650,000 participants securing fractional ownership of its decentralised AI model, Dobby.

The campaign distributed NFTs called "Fingerprints," granting holders access to the AI model and marking a significant move towards community-controlled AI.

The minting process required participants to verify their humanity through a randomised IQ test, ensuring genuine human involvement in governing the AI model.

This approach aims to foster a more inclusive and democratic AI development environment.

According to Sandeep Nailwal, Polygon founder and Sentient core contributor, emerging artificial general intelligence (AGI) should be community-controlled to guarantee its loyalty.

Sentient's fingerprinting mechanism enables communities to enforce ownership, control, and alignment of open-source AI models.

This incentivises collaborative efforts to build high-quality models, ensuring that AGI is open-source and collectively owned rather than controlled by a single institution.

Himanshu Tyagi, co-founder of Sentient, said Dobby's loyalty stems from community ownership, alignment, and control, enabling collective governance of its development.

The minting event follows the launch of DeepSeek, an AI-powered chatbot developed on a budget of $6 million.

Sentient's approach contrasts with centralised models like OpenAI's, with Dobby and DeepSeek both being open source.

This allows developers public access to their source code.

Sentient's fingerprinting technology embeds a query-response pair directly into the AI model, ensuring a consistent output for verification and preventing unauthorised use.

This tamper-resistant mechanism helps communities verify the model's identity and prevent misappropriation.

The Dobby project represents a significant step in decentralising AI technology and enhancing community involvement in its development.