"Sentient's Dobby: 650K Humans Mint NFTs, Revolutionize AI Ownership"

Sentient, a pioneering blockchain-based AI company, has made history by completing one of the largest non-fungible token (NFT) minting campaigns in the crypto industry. The campaign, which involved over 650,000 participants, granted fractional ownership of Sentient's decentralized AI model, Dobby, through the minting of unique NFTs known as "fingerprints."

Dobby's minting process required participants to prove their humanity by passing a randomized IQ test, ensuring that only genuine human beings could secure ownership of the AI model. This innovative approach aims to create a community-controlled AI protocol, fostering a more inclusive and democratic approach to AI development.

Sandeep Nailwal, Polygon founder and Sentient core contributor, emphasized the importance of community control and ownership in the development of emerging artificial general intelligence (AGI). According to Nailwal, the first AGI should be "community-controlled and community-owned to guarantee its loyalty." Sentient's fingerprinting mechanism enables communities to enforce ownership, control, and alignment of open-source AI models, incentivizing collective efforts to build high-quality open-source models.

The record-breaking minting event follows the launch of DeepSeek, an AI-powered chatbot developed on a $5.6 million budget, significantly less than the reported $100 million spent on developing ChatGPT by OpenAI. While the largest NFT mint to date was Yuga Labs' Otherdeed NFT mint, which sold over 55,000 units of virtual land, Sentient's Dobby mint stands out due to the sheer number of unique participants involved.

Dobby's decentralized architecture addresses a crucial problem in the AI industry by offering an open-source alternative to centralized models like OpenAI's. By placing the ownership of the AI model directly in the hands of the community, Dobby fosters collective governance and ensures that the development trajectory aligns with the values and principles of its users. The model's alignment enables the community to set its values and offers granular control over which model behaviors can be activated.

The renewed investor interest in AI agents was catalyzed by Luna, which executed an autonomous blockchain transaction without human input in early January. Coincidentally, the 0G Foundation launched an $88.88 million ecosystem fund on the same day as Dobby's record mint, aiming to accelerate projects creating AI-powered applications and