XAI is built in the same manner as other bitcoin-based crypto currencies, with a few extra needs. Tag v6.1.14 is the last publicly released build of Sapience (i.e. everything in a "normal" coin before all of the XAI specific services). Past that tag, building the Qt graphical wallet requires Lua 5.3 and libqtlua 2. You can edit the paths to those dependencies in the .pro file.
Our interest with the Sapience AIFX project is to develop a distributed artificial intelligence system running on a coin network, with a primary initial goal of enabling neural network services to be consumed by both users and systems, specifically the Quotient (XQN) algorithmic trading interface, and a longer term goal of applying AGI through knowledge gathering and machine learning.