Sentient's Open Deep Search Challenges AI Giants, Aims to Democratize AI Development

America's 'DeepSeek Moment' Has Arrived, Peter Thiel-Backed Nonprofit Says - Decrypt

Sentient, a San Francisco-based AI development lab valued at $1.2 billion, announced Tuesday afternoon the public release of Open Deep Search (ODS), an open-source AI search framework. Over key benchmarks, Sentient claims it outperforms major closed-source competitors like Perplexity and OpenAI's GPT-4o Search Preview. Backed by Peter Thiel's Founder's Fund, Sentient claims its work represents America's answer to China's DeepSeek. When it broke out, DeepSeek's open-source model questioned industry beliefs and caused a $1 trillion tech slump. Sentient's models challenge the "dominance of closed AI systems" as the U.S. approaches its own "DeepSeek moment," the company said in a statement shared with Decrypt. Operating as a nonprofit, Sentient argues AI development "should belong to the community, not controlled by closed-source corporations." According to Sentient testing, ODS scored 75.3% accuracy on the FRAMES benchmark, significantly outperforming GPT-4o Search Preview (50.5%) and Perplexity Sonar Reasoning Pro (44.4%). ODS uses Sentient's Open Search Tool, powered by an agentic framework, to rephrase queries and extract context from results. Asked about their testing methodology, Sentient co-founder Himanshu Tyagi told Decrypt that the benchmarking framework required models "to orchestrate knowledge from multiple sources." To make ODS more efficient, "ground truth" sources such as Wikipedia were excluded. This ensured that models "relied on their retrieval systems" instead of being artificially assisted, creating "a more realistic and rigorous evaluation," Tyagi claimed. ODS reached these numbers using an "agentic approach that writes self-correcting code," Tyagi said. That approach helped build out and determine which questions were needed to get a final answer. When the framework misses a critical piece of info, it calls the search tool again, but with a more specific query to retrieve more precise information. If it hits a speed bump, the model does "enhanced query rephrasing, multi-pass retrieval, and intelligent chunking and reranking of web pages," Tyagi explained. ODS and its evaluations can now be reviewed on their public GitHub repository. When DeepSeek came to global attention in January, Decrypt asked NYU Shanghai professor Bogna Konior why this was a key moment. "We now routinely let AI draft our thoughts -- a development as remarkable as the invention of language itself," Konior told Decrypt. "It's as if humanity is recreating that pivotal moment of language invention within computers." The parallels between DeepSeek and Sentient show these philosophical shifts for AI. "Once open-source technology is released into the world, it cannot be contained," Konior said. Sentient believes that the moment has arrived for America.

Sentient open-source AI search outperforms GPT-4o and Perplexity

"AI should belong to the community, not controlled by closed-source corporations," Sentient's co-founder told Cointelegraph. Sentient, an artificial intelligence development platform backed by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, has released an open-source AI search framework that it says outperforms leading closed-source competitors. The company announced the public release of Open Deep Search (ODS) on April 2, describing it as a high-performance, developer-friendly alternative to platforms like Perplexity AI and OpenAI's GPT-4o. Sentient's ODS aims to empower developers with open-source "Loyal AI" models, which Sentient says preserve the original intent of their developers. The firm's fingerprinting technology allows developers to protect intellectual property while maintaining model openness -- aiming to solve the biggest issue of open-source AI, the challenges of monetizing a model without centralization. "AI should belong to the community, not controlled by closed-source corporations," according to Himanshu Tyagi, co-founder of Sentient and professor at the Indian Institute of Science. "We're building, monetizing and delivering open-source AI with a key principle in mind: singularity in intelligence but plurality in use cases," he added. "Open-source development ensures performance and user control that closed systems simply cannot match." Related: Crypto trader turns $2K PEPE into $43M, sells for $10M profit Sentient's ODS scored 75.3% accuracy on the "Frames" benchmark, which measures factuality, retrieval and reasoning capabilities, used to answer complex "multi-hop questions" that require the integration of multiple sources. ODS surpassed OpenAI's ChatGPT-4o Search Preview's 50.5% and the Perplexity Sonar Reasoning Pro, which scored 44.4%. To prevent potential bias, Sentient ensured that its researchers didn't have access to the Frames testing sets during the benchmarking process. "Independent verification is only needed for closed-source solutions because open-source solutions have no incentive to falsely report the evaluations," Tyagi said, adding: "Anyone with a computer can run our code, reproduce our results, and verify whether it is correct or not. The numbers reported can be reproduced using the repo's eval section by anyone and thus are globally verifiable." The ODS release follows growing interest in Sentient's platform. The firm said it amassed more than 1.8 million waitlist registrations in the lead-up to the launch. Related: $1T stablecoin supply could drive next crypto rally -- CoinFund's Pakman The release of Sentient's new open-source search framework comes amid a tipping point for open-source AI development. "We're witnessing a significant shift as open-source AI solutions increasingly challenge closed-source dominance," Tyagi said. "Examples such as DeepSeek's advancements in reasoning, Manus's innovations with agents, and now our own contributions to ODS with advanced AI search frameworks highlight this shift," he added. "Open-source models can easily outperform closed-source giants with the right architecture," said Sewoong Oh, Sentient's lead researcher and professor at the University of Washington. "The results of these benchmarks validate our mission to create an open ecosystem that benefits all AI builders and users." The launch also builds on Sentient's earlier momentum. In February, the firm completed one of the largest NFT minting campaigns to date, with more than 650,000 participants gaining fractional ownership of its AI models.

Sentient's advanced, open-source AI reasoning comes to Sentient Chat

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.

Peter Thiel-Backed Nonprofit Sentient Aims To Be America's DeepSeek, Takes Aim At Closed AI Systems - Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA)

Sentient, a San Francisco-based AI development lab backed by Peter Thiel's Founder's Fund, has unveiled its open-source AI search framework, positioning its work as a response to China's DeepSeek. What Happened: Sentient released its Open Deep Search (ODS) framework, stating that it outperforms major closed-source competitors like OpenAI's GPT-4o Search Preview and Perplexity Sonar Reasoning Pro, reported Decrypt. The nonprofit lab argues that its open-source approach challenges the growing control of AI by closed-source corporations. Its ODS achieved a 75.3% accuracy on the FRAMES benchmark, the company said. See Also: Elon Musk Says Tesla Doesn't Need Lidar Because 'People Don't Shoot Lasers Out Of Their Eyes' After YouTubers Put His Cars Through Wylie E. Coyote Tests Sentient co-founder Himanshu Tyagi said that the system requires models to synthesize knowledge from multiple sources, avoiding artificial boosts from preloaded data. To enhance efficiency, traditional "ground truth" resources like Wikipedia were intentionally excluded, according to the report. Why It Matters: The company positioned the release of ODS as America's answer to China's DeepSeek. As a nonprofit, Sentient advocates for AI development to be community-driven rather than dominated by closed-source corporations. DeepSeek's AI breakthrough in late January sparked a major selloff in U.S. tech stocks, wiping $593 billion from Nvidia Corp.'s NVDA market value as investors grew concerned about rising competition. Subscribe to the Benzinga Tech Trends newsletter to get all the latest tech developments delivered to your inbox. Last month, DeepSeek released its upgraded V3 model, enhancing its reasoning and coding capabilities. DeepSeek's founder, Liang Wenfeng, has also opted to keep the company's core AI models open-source, rejecting monetization plans. Microsoft Corporation MSFT CEO Satya Nadella has also reportedly acknowledged DeepSeek as a "wake-up call" for the tech giant, urging his teams to focus on creating impactful products. Image via Shutterstock Check out more of Benzinga's Consumer Tech coverage by following this link. Read Next: Jamie Dimon Cashed Out $234 Million In JPMorgan Stock, Warren Buffett Stockpiled $334 Billion In Cash -- Weeks Later, Markets Crashed. Coincidence? Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors. MSFTMicrosoft Corp$370.50-3.06%Stock Score Locked: Want to See it? Benzinga Rankings give you vital metrics on any stock - anytime. Reveal Full ScoreEdge RankingsMomentum36.54Growth64.54Quality32.43Value14.57Price TrendShortMediumLongOverviewNVDANVIDIA Corp$104.15-5.45%Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs