Greetings Kambrians! We have been quite busy recently with events, so we are happy to share with you a recap from our most recent AMA . Kambria CEO and co-founder Thuc Vu and Community Manager William Ryan joined CryptoDiffer on Friday August 23rd, 2019 for an exclusive ask-me-anything with their community of over 10,000 active users! We’d like to thank CryptoDiffer for inviting us. We had a great time talking with everyone.
The 1.5 hour-long event began with the CryptoDiffer team introducing Thuc and William, and asking questions about our project. It was a great opportunity to educate a large audience about the Kambria Platform, what we’ve been up to, and where we plan to go from here. After the questions from the CryptoDiffer team, the floor was opened up to the community to ask us anything. The top 20 questions were then selected and answered. Each of the people who had their question selected earned almost 10,000 KAT!
Without further delay, here is a recap of the entire conversation! Be sure to read on, as we have provided some special insight into the plans we have to continue to #BUIDL and grow our strong developer and token communities.
CryptoDiffer:
We are glad to meet here:
Dr. Thuc Vu (@thucvu) – CEO at Kambria
William (@RobotComms) – Community Manager at Kambria
Can you introduce yourself to the community? What is your background and how did you come to the idea to create your project?
Dr. Thuc Vu - Kambria CEO and Co-Founder
Yeah absolutely. Let me take this question.
My name is Thuc Vu, and I’m a geek & an entrepreneur at heart. I have been doing computer programming for more than 25 years, and AI for more than 15 years. I did my undergraduate program at Carnegie Mellon University, and later a PhD at Stanford, both in Computer Science, focusing on Artificial Intelligence.
Right after Stanford, I started a company called Katango which provided social analytics for users on Facebook. Katango got acquired by Google less than 2 years later. I stayed at Google for 3 years, and then left to start OhmniLabs/Kambria with 2 other cofounders, Jared Go, and Tingxi Tan, in July 2015.
Our startup was built upon the premise that to really accelerate adoption of robotics in the homes, a new type of company was needed. Being far away from home ourselves, we could relate to the needs for affordable robots that bring families closer. So we set out to design robots with modular components, and utilize lean, toolless manufacture. To close the cost gap, we were ultra-focused on iteration speed. Reusability and integration were the cornerstones of our fabrication process, allowing for orders of magnitude less capital spent and a fraction of the development time.
In the short span of just two years, we were able to prototype ten generations of a telepresence robot. We even saved 1 LIFE with our robots. But even though we had successfully brought a low-cost high-value robot to market by practicing our philosophy of ultra-lean, fast and agile manufacturing, our ultimate goal has always been to enhance the entire process, overcome existing shortfalls encountered in the industry, and jump start a revolution in robotics.
Being able to foster an open collaborative ecosystem, where every contribution can easily be shared, manufactured, and implemented, will be revolutionary. Companies can benefit from the collective contribution from the community to build custom applications without having to employ teams of PhDs. End users can enjoy the higher quality of life potentially afforded by more available robot products and services. A combination of reduced costs, cutting edge technologies, and swift delivery, will spur rapid adoption of the Kambria platform by companies, developers, and manufacturers. This cycle of innovation will pave the way for the next wave of robots to provide immense value for people across the world.
This is why we named the platform Kambria, after the Cambrian Explosion, 500 million years ago, when an accelerated evolutionary rate gave rise to biodiversity and abundance. We believe this platform will be the catalyst for a similar explosion in intelligent robotics.
William Ryan - Kambria Community Manager
Thanks for having me everyone! My name is William, and I joined Kambria in September of last year. Prior to that, I worked with several blockchain start-ups. Having joined crypto in 2015, I became completely enamoured with blockchain technology, and decided I wanted to pursue it as a career. Loving the community, working with the public was pretty much a dream for me, so naturally having the opportunity to work with you guys was thrilling for me.
I’ve worked with Airfox (Airtoken), MetaCert Security Protocols, and GNY Machine Learning Platform. I have always loved technology from a young age, so when I learned that Kambria was developing robotics and AI, I geeked out and wouldn’t leave them alone until they brought me on.
CryptoDiffer Team:
Can you briefly describe what is Kambria in 3-5 sentences?
Dr. Thuc Vu:
Yeah definitely. Kambria is the first decentralized open innovation platform for AI & Robotics. Using our platform, anyone can collaborate in researching, developing and commercializing innovative ideas and get rewarded fairly for their contributions.
Through partnerships with government agencies, top universities and leading companies, Kambria is dedicated to building a sustainable open innovation ecosystem to change the way we innovate and to accelerate advanced technology development and industry adoption.
As one of the very few blockchain projects that have existing commercial products, a strong developer community and a passionate user base, we aim to build an ecosystem that will bring the next wave of robotics and AI to provide value to billions of people around the world.
CryptoDiffer Team:
What are the major milestones you achieved since ICO?
Dr. Thuc Vu:
We have made a lot of good progress in such a short timeframe. In October we released our MVP, and in June of this year, we released the full launch of our Open Innovation Platform. For the first time ever, developers, researchers, and corporations can design, prototype, share, and develop both hardware and software in the same platform. Through open collaboration, Kambria users have the ability to outsource developer talent and skip the millions of dollars in research and development that developing new robotics and AI can cost.
Once our platform was released, we collaborated with Vietnamese government’s Ministry of Science & Technology and the Ministry of Planning & Investment, McKinsey & Company, VietAI, and the Vietnam Innovation Network to deliver a series of hackathons and educational workshops focused on AI and Robotics. Vietnam AI Grand Challenge was the largest AI hackathon that Vietnam has ever hosted. The hackathon served as a proof-of-concept for the platform and demonstrated the usefulness of the Kambria Platform. Over 700 participants competed over 3 days, in 3 cities to build the ultimate AI virtual assistant. Using both OhmniLabs’ robotics, and Kambria’s bounty platform, developers worked around the clock to compete for the $40,000 in prizes. Because of the great success of our first major hackathon, we have caught the attention of the AI community, and we are working on expanding the platform to include many major hackathons and bounty challenges, where top corporations can collaborate with us to develop the next break-out technologies.
Here is a recap of the VAGC Event!
There are a lot of really cool applications with commercial potentials coming out of the Hackathon. We have several large corporations interested in partnering with the teams there to apply the technology into their businesses.
Also this year, we made the decision to migrate a portion our native token, KAT, to Binance Chain. By expanding the Kambria blockchain to include both ERC20 and BEP2 tokens, we achieve increased decentralization and interoperability, taking advantage of the many benefits of utilizing the Binance Chain blockchain. Binance Chain focuses on performance, ease-of-use, and liquidity, allowing Kambria to tap into a global network of developers, enthusiasts, and token holders.This provides our community with the safest and most secure trading through Binance DEX so that users can trade their KAT comfortably without the worry of losing their tokens to an exchange hack. To celebrate this and foster the adoption of our BEP2 token KAT-7BB, we are offering everyone the opportunity to earn a 10% bonus by swapping our ERC20 KAT for KAT-7BB. You can find more information about this limited time offer HERE.
CryptoDiffer Team:
Thank you for answer! And the last one from me: What are your plans for the nearest year in terms of marketing and business development? How do you plan to expand the network, community, partnerships, etc? What’s your vector?
William:
Happy to take this one. Great question !
Throughout late last year into 2019, Kambria focused heavily on building great relationships with our corporate partners and developer communities. Our development has gone quite quickly, with our main launch released only 6 months after our token, so we got to work quickly on developing partnerships. Kambria is working with top universities, research labs, enterprise companies, and developers to build a unique ecosystem where we connect researchers and developers with the companies who are trying to acquire new technologies. Now that we are moving to the next phase in our development, it’s time to lean on these partnerships to maximize exposure and create highly visible events, such as our VAGC hackathon. We have several programs in place, such as our Global Innovation Fund, where we are working with Lehigh University who is using our technology to build physical AI robots. The platform has proven highly effective, as they have managed to build a voice controlled robot with facial recognition software using an Ohmni robot in a matter of three months. Normally, this could take years of work and cost millions of dollars! We are focused on expanding these programs and onboard many universities and companies who wish to build new technology. We have a full-time marketing team who’s only goal is to create additional brand exposure to acquire platform users.
Here are our current corporate partnerships.
Our primary focus has always been obtaining real users, as that is one of the glaring problems in the blockchain space. We want to foster adoption, and so we target those outside of the blockchain space as our primary users.
Moving forward, we are continually expanding platform functionality, with the next release being our Kambria Codebase. This will allow developers to build and share their technology, which will allow it to be licensed and monetized. This critical platform feature will allow developers to come in and build the last 10% of an idea instead of having to build everything from scratch. Because most technologies are built in siloes, that makes developing these technologies out of reach for most small to medium enterprise companies. This will no longer be the case. Kambria will be the “go-to” solution for developing and manufacturing both hardware and software at the same time.
Community is very important to us, and we’d love to have you, so please do join our Telegram and say hello.
Cryptodiffer Community:
How is Kambria different from other robotic projects in terms of robotics development?
How big is your addressable market and what are the future growth potentials?
Dr. Thuc Vu:
Most of other robotics projects are very silo’ed. There is no common platform and incentive for projects to collaborate. This results in a huge inefficiencies where each project has to re-invent the wheel, to develop almost from scratch. This costs time, effort, and capital, and can make the project miss the window of opportunity completely. If you think about it, only a handful of large corps or well-funded startups have cutting edge robotics technology.
For Kambria, we recognize these points, and hence focus on building out a sustainable open innovation platform to get people collaborate and share technologies. The hope is to build the second Linux community but for AI and Robotics.
Cryptodiffer Community:
1. What will be unique in KAMBRIA’s Resource Library? Will it be free for users or they will have to pay for reaching these resources?
2. Why did you need a PARTNERSHIP with a stable coin solution?
William:
#1 – Kambria’s resource library is free to access; however, to drive adoption for the token, we require that you hold KAT in your wallet. We believed this be the best way to provide fair access to the largest number of people without sacrificing demand for the token. We will offer higher level educational content at a premium, which may include certifications which you can take with you to help you find jobs. We are working out these details, but education is a major focus of ours. The resource library will be unique in that you will be able to find high-level technical content consolidated in one place without having to spend 10s of thousands of dollars for it.
EDIT (not included in our AMA): Kambria does have a partnership with stablecoin Terra Money. You can read about the details of this collaboration here!
Cryptodiffer Community:
Do you think collaboratiion betwen strangers to work on a project is practical and not idealistic ? What is the value of collabration?
William:
Thats a fantastic question. So, Kambria’s decentralized platform has a system of judges in place to ensure that sloppy code or bad actors have their contributions rejected. In addition to that, in order to contribute code to bounties, you will have to stake KAT. This will discourage bad actors from using the platform. Open collaboration is a massive benefit. If you look at open source project like Linux, that now has something like 16 million lines of code, it has been an incredible success. The key is to drive innovation, and this is very difficult to do in “silos,” but we can build better, together.
Here is an infographic and article explaining bounties.
Cryptodiffer Community:
What is the utility of Kambria and the reason for mass adoption of Kambria in the future?
Dr. Thuc Vu:
The biggest utility of Kambria is providing a platform where the key stakeholders in AI/Robotics can come together:
- Talented developers that want to work on cutting-edge AI/Robotics technology
- Entrepreneurs with keen sense of the potential use cases for robotics in our society
- Large corporations and funds that can invest and commercialize the applications coming out of Kambria
There is no such a compelling platform so far exist. And the network effect of this is huge. As more technologies get developed on Kambria, more use cases will be invented/explored, and more money will flow into the projects. We believe the potential of AI/Robotics in the future is limitless. And Kambria is posed to be the key platform to facilitate the development, application, and adoption of those technologies.
Cryptodiffer Community:
Why AI need Blockchain to evolve??
Dr. Thuc Vu:
I think AI does not need Blockchain to evolve per se. But Blockchain can significantly speed up and facilitate the development process for AI and Robotics. At Kambria we adopt Blockchain for the following reasons.
- The most important reasons for Kambria to adopt blockchain is to build our own tokenomics, which allows us to build a community much faster and stronger than any other traditional open source projects. If you think about it, traditional projects either need a lot of financial backing from a big company (like Android and Google) or are at the mercy of developers willing to donate their free time (like Linux). With our blockchain-based KAT token, Kambria can actively acquire technology that is locked away in patents and research labs, as well as, reward developers who contribute to Kambria.
- The second benefit using blockchain technology is to break down the process of innovation from being designed to production and manufacturing, and then on to commercialization. It allows different parties to address each piece separately while maintaining transparency and trust and then being able to distribute all of the upside through using tokenomics. This way the best engineers can focus on making the best robots, while the best entrepreneurs can focus on finding the best markets and use cases, and get fairly compensated.
- The third factor is that blockchain technology allows Kambria to operate in an open system. Users can maintain and develop on top of it, and the technology is owned by the community. AI and robotics are way too important to be owned by just a few big corporations. You can already see some of the abuses and privacy violations coming out of the largest social network. We want to make sure that Kambria will better serve society as a whole.
Cryptodiffer Community:
What fundamental role does education play for the development of the KAMBRIA project? Do you have any project to support young university students from emerging countries in Africa and South America?
William:
I really like this. I’ll answer this one because Thuc is quite humble and probably won’t talk about it, but Thuc’s heart for young people is incredible. He created the VietSeeds.org foundation that helps youth who come from difficult backgrounds get into college and develop careers in technology. Education is paramount for the future of humanity, which is why that is one of our primary vectors. A ton a great innovations come out of university research programs, but due to intellectual propery quandaries and a lack of a proper marketplace, many of these technologies are lost after the project is complete. Kambria will allow these research programs to open source, monetize, and share these technologies with the world.
Additionally, we just want to help teach people about robotics, AI, and other frontier technologies because this tech is changing the world. We want to be a part of that. While we are heavily focused on Vietnam, this vision is far broader than that. We are already also working in Bangladesh and India, and we are trying to expand into other emerging markets as well. So, the answer is yes. No matter where you are from, we have programs in place, and you can join the platform by contributing to bounties when available.
Cryptodiffer Community:
You intend to change the tides in the robotic innovation game by incentivizing sharing innovation and penalizing defector, which is great, but how do we get the big players to take part in Kambria version of the game?
Dr. Thuc Vu:
This is a great question. We do this by doing a grass-root movement, starting from building out a strong developer community and developing cutting-edge technologies. Not all big players have advanced AI and Robotics technologies. But EVERYONE has fear of missing out on the AI/Robotics train. So naturally the big players that are lagging behind will want to corporate with us first in order to get the technologies that they need. We see this signal very clearly from markets such as Japan, Korea, Vietnam. Huge markets but not all big players are technology advanced. Once we get the ball rolling, we can push on developing the best AI/Robotics tech available out there. And at that point, other big tech players such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon, will pay attention and willing to collaborate with us.
Cryptodiffer Community:
Why you choose Binance Chain/ BEP2 over others? What benefits does it provides you and how it help you in development and growth of your project?
What is KDNA? Can you explain it to us in short ? What is the Role of KDNA?
William:
Can you explain it to us in short ? What is the Role of KDNA?
KDNA is the Kambria codebase. It’s the lifeblood of the platform. KDNA will allow developers to utilize previously created technologies instead of having to develop everything from scratch. For example, lets say you are building an autonomous robot for a specific function. KDNA will allow you to utilize the robotic platform from one developer, the navigation logic from another developer, so you can focus on building the last 10% of what you are trying to accomplish. Instead of spending millions in R&D, you pay a small licensing fee and get to work. It’s also a way to track contributions to Kambria.
“Kambria offers a platform so that participants can collaborate easier, and provides a mechanism called KDNA to help describe the codebases better, while linking them together. People are encouraged to register their codebases on the platform to create a KDNA file for their codebases. The role of KDNA file is to store codebase information like authors, description, BOM, and to store the link between codebases, so that when someone wants to build a product from that codebase, they will know what other components they need, and how to construct all the elements to make a product.”
Read more about the Kambria Codebase KDNA here!
Cryptodiffer Community:
The competition for AI is tough, do you have any “secret weapons” to succeed?
What has been the biggest difficulty in keeping up with AI and blockchain technology?
Dr. Thuc Vu:
Our “secret weapon” here is the open innovation community. Bringing talented developers together to help solve the hardest and most impactful challenges in AI/Robotics, while giving them a very compelling incentives, will help us get ahead of the game.
AI and Blockchain both are still at a very nascent stage right now. So by being at the intersection of both is doubly challenging. Lots of changes, lots of unknowns. It requires us to continue to stay innovative and courageous to bringing the communities, the technologies, and the applications together.
Cryptodiffer Community:
Why should investor buy KAT token? why should we invest in it? how Kambria will attract investors?
Kambria is working on hightech ai such a revolunary project any plan to list on hq exchanges?
William:
I believe we are leveraged in a unique position in that we are driving real adoption. The blockchain space has tremendously struggled in this area. With the most recent positivity around BTC, it’s certainly getting better than last year, but yet, many projects are still struggling to get real users on their platform. Because we have a very unique platform, that puts us in a very good position to attract real users who are not currently in the space.
We are strategically developing a number of token holder incentives to attract people to the token. We recently began with offering our community a 10% bonus for swapping their ERC20 KAT for KAT-7BB on Binance Chain. That is great, but we have decided that to better serve our community, that we would like to reduce our supply by a significant margin. In the coming weeks, you will hear about a monumental token burn. We are still working those details out, but we believe it will get a lot of people’s attention.
Our community is first, and we want people to want to hold our tokens. We want our token holders to desire to participate in our platform as well, so even if you’re not a developer, you will have a tremendous amount of opportunity to participate, earn rewards, and benefit from the token. We all know incentives are what drive people, so we are building our model around rewarding our ecosystem. Plus, we plan to work with some major players in the tech space, so it’s only a matter of time before the crowd figures it out.
Cryptodiffer Community:
Is it possible to compare existing AI projects (for example, Watson from IBM) and Kambria. What are the fundamental differences?
Please name a few significant startups and the nature of their activities that have appeared in the Kambria OIH recently. What specific problems do they solve?
Dr. Thuc Vu:
Yeah absolutely, projects like Watson starting out by focusing on question answering and it was “closed” in a sense. IBM own the platform, and even though there is a SDK to plug in your knowledge base, the technologies belong to IBM, not the community. If you want to improve Watson algorithm, you have to go work for IBM. For Kambria, we focus on openness, getting the developers together to develop the tech and sharing the code so that people can develop on top of each other’s work, and reducing the cost of re-inventing the wheel.
There have been several really exciting projects coming out of Kambria on personal virtual assistant in different verticals such as retail (helping the customers to purchase fashion related items), in senior care (improving the quality of life for the elderly), in F&B (receptionists, store clerks, etc.). We will start promoting/sharing more information about them soon.
EDIT (not included in our AMA): Read more about Kambria's Open Innovation Hubs here!
Cryptodiffer Community
How has Kambria been involved in the “hackathon”? And in detail, what benefits has it brought?
William:
Hackathons are insanely popular in the tech world, as I’m sure you know. But why they are so popular is really the key. Corporations use them to essentially have others develop new technology (or ideas) in a rapid amount of time. It costs FAR less to run a hackathon than it does to completely develop something from scratch. We place great emphasis on hackathons because they are a powerful tool that allow us to bootstrap new technology in a matter of days. Obviously its not a finished product that quickly, but it streamlines the development process by a huge margin.
Cryptodiffer Team:
It was a pleasure to conduct an AMA with such a cool project like Kambria. Thank you for your time!
Thank you everyone for your questions, hopefully Kambria team will come to our chat in the nearest future with huge news!
Thank you for reading this AMA recap! We hope you learned more about our project. We will have more events in the near future, so be sure to follow all of our channels for regular up-to-date information.
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