Challenge 0 for Sentient's Arena is set: “Grounded Reasoning over Large Corpora.”
Economically viable AI solutions, high in demand across developers & enterprises, are centered around grounded reasoning, or the ability to parse, extract, and compute over large bodies of data.
From a technical perspective, grounded reasoning is the composition of several failure-prone subsystems: perception, retrieval, ranking, disambiguation, numerical or symbolic computation, and final answer synthesis. Each step can be locally plausible and still lead to the wrong answer.
That is why this is still a frontier problem.
Frontier models now perform well on many abstract reasoning tests, but grounded tasks remain far from solved.
On OfficeQA, Databricks reports that even the best parsed-page setup only achieves ~70%. SealQA is also far from solved, with GPT-5 failing to pass ~45%.
In fact, many other top benchmarks are actually grounded reasoning benchmarks: BrowseComp, GAIA, APEX-Agents, Fin-RATE, DABstep, and more.
Differentiating superior reasoning solutions to such problems allows us to study valuable reasoning traces that can teach the next generation of AI models how to beat similar tasks with greater ease. In the same vein, abstracting good solutions into skills helps us build a good agentic library of capabilities in the interim.
We are excited to meet Cohort 0 in just a few days to work on this problem together, how it relates to their startups, or how their work with us can help them launch new businesses.
Applications are now live!
Cohort 0 starts March 13th in Presidio with OpenHands, OpenRouter, alphaXiv, Fireworks, Dedalus Labs, Franklin Templeton, Founders Fund and Pantera.
→ $25K in prizes
→ 3 weeks building state-of-the-art AI agents
→ Many more surprises
Apply below 👇