AMA with TomoChain Advisor — Dr. Thuc Vu from Kambria
The AMA with Dr. Thuc Vu from Kambria last Friday was exploded by many (tough) questions from TomoChain community. A big applause to Thuc for sharing with us many aspects of Kambria project and his thought regarding the partnership with TomoChain. Below is compiling all the Q&As from the AMA.
Dr. Thuc Vu is a serial entrepreneur, with multiple company acquisitions, the last one by Google. He has deep expertise in game theory, tournament design and multi-agent systems. He earned his PhD from Stanford and BS from Carnegie Mellon, both in computer science. Dr. Vu is a social entrepreneur in Vietnam, involved in several community projects.
Kambria project as a whole
In your opinion, would the Blockchain able to establish itself as a mainstream technology for OPEN INNOVATION ecosystems based on its current capabilities? If not, what else do we need?
I think Blockchain is a great enabler for Open Innovation ecosystems. But it is still a bit early in its development. I believe features like very fast speed and low/zero transaction cost that TomoChain providing are essential to help spur the ecosystem. Without those features, I think the speed of development of Open Innovation ecosystem will be much slower.
How do you think the innovation process will be transformed in the next 3 years in terms of the way we do business and engage in competition?
The is a huge push for open innovation recently, from not only academic and open source projects, but also big companies, such as Microsoft, who opened up 20k+ patents. People realized that the way innovation has been done is not efficient. Lots of efforts and capital got wasted when the innovations are not shared. We believe open innovation will help speed up and reduce the cost, and more importantly, allow us to tackle social issues that have been ignored largely by big corps or big VCs, such as global warming, or ocean pollution
What do you think about future of robotics and AI? Do you think that it will affect the job market?
Robotics and AI play a crucial role in our future. The job market will definitely be affected. But you can think of a similar situation: the Internet. When the Internet became popular, a lot of jobs were replaced, but there were a lot more new jobs as well. No one would imagine how web designers and developers are the hottest jobs these days right? So I believe it’s the same with Robotics and AI. It has the capability to vastly improve the quality of life for everyone, and create new jobs for the society. The main question is how do we steward this direction of this field. It’s too important to belong to a few large corporations, which will abuse their power. So that’s where we believe Kambria could help, to put the ownership back to the community and steer the direction to be beneficial for everyone.
What inspired you to start Kambria?
We developed robots at OhmniLabs for the last 3 years, reached production, and been selling hundreds of robots worldwide. Along the way we realized two key insights, robotics development is very challenging, and a lot of big corporations want/need customized robotics technology for their markets. And since we have a really innovative process of developing and customizing robots using 3D-printing, these companies reached out to us and asked us to help them. Instead of doing all these work ourselves, we decided to develop Kambria, an open platform, so that we can build an ecosystem and a community to develop these techs.
And what makes Kambria products stand out from the robotics market?
Traditionally robotics products are quite expensive and most of them are catered toward manufacturing and industrial use cases. For the consumer space, there is no product out there that has achieved mass production, due to the high cost and the value of the robots are not high to consumers. For Kambria, we have taken a really innovation approach in developing and manufacturing robots using 3D-printing technology. This coupled with a community of developers from universities, open source projects, free-lancing talents, we can really push for low-cost, high-capability robots that can do various tasks in social environments. And on the other sides, partnering with large corporations, who already have existing markets, we can really deploy these technology with our partners quickly, to capture value and market share.
What is the role of OhmniLabs in Kambria project?
OhmniLabs is the existing robotics company from which Kambria was spun off. There is great synergy between the two entities. OhmniLabs will seed the robotics tech on Kambria with its current robot Ohmni and will provide prototyping, and manufacturing services for new projects developing on Kambria. On the other direction, new tech from Kambria can also be deployed onto Ohmni which have been sold worldwide, so that Kambria can commercialized this tech easily and quickly.
Also what is the market you are trying to reach first Asian or it doesnt really matter?
It really does not matter. However, we have been focusing a lot on Asia because of the regulations here are more open and supportive, as compared to say, the US.
After many startup projects in many different fields, why did you choose blockchain technology?
I have been lucky enough to witness and participate in a lot of cutting edge technology development through my previous startup projects. AI, Robotics, Mobile, Social, etc. And I believe Blockchain is the next technology revolution. It will probably have the same effects and impacts as the Internet. And I see a lot of advantages to adopt this technology. We are still at a very early stage of Blockchain, but only by incorporating Blockchain now into our design, our thinking, and tech development, we can capture the lion share of values when it become mainstream.
What are the key challenges for you as you are trying to build the Kambria platform?
We have a big vision with Kambria and of course with big vision, there are a lot of big challenges. For us, the biggest is actually regulation, which we do not have too much control over. We see a huge demand already from big corporations for AI and Robotics Technology. We see a huge supply of talents and techs from universities, open source communities. So the condition is prime to connect these two sides. Now the biggest challenge is how to make sure the regulation environment would facilitate these collaborations.
Could you clarify the 5 main components of Kambria architecture: KDNA (Kambria codebase); marketplace; manufacturing; value capture and legal enforcement.
These 5 components are the pillars to support a strong ecosystem. I won’t go into details here, but you can think of this as we are tokenizing the whole startup process, breaking it down to the core steps, from ideation, to prototyping, to manufacturing, and then commercialization. And we allow people to participate in any of these steps with our tokenomics, where they are most passionate, and competent. For example, an AI hacker can just focus on developing the best AI technology, while an experienced businessman can focus on applying the technology in the market that he already knows best. And this will help us unlock a lot of potential markets and generate values to users.
Community and Economics Talk
Could you explain more about token economics in Kambria platform?
Kambria has a really interesting two tier token system. The first tier is KAT, which is a utility tokens for transactions, access, and governance. The second tier is KARMA, which is like a security tokens, that allow Kambria to share revenue from commercializing the technology on Kambria to Karma holders. However, since the regulations around security token is not clear yet, we do not allow Karma to be tradable. Users will have to use KAT and contribute to Kambria in order to get rewarded with Karma.
What is token price raising mechanism of Kambria since now all ICO projects dump after listed on the exchange?
Thanks for the question, but since KAT is utility token, we are not supposed to discuss or put in any mechanism for token price raising :) But I could tell you that as the capabilities of the technology on Kambria grow, we will see a lot more real world applications coming out of Kambria, which will generate more revenue, and will in turns, benefit the whole community.
It takes time and a lot of resources for AI, Robotics. Is the fund raised enough to develop another vertical of Kambria?
Yeah AI and Robotics development takes a lot of resources. And we believe with the way we approach this through using tokenomics and blockchain to build developer community, we can develop really awesome tech, even with the fund raised. We will only focus on AI & Robotics ourselves, but will not turn down working with other partners who want to push for some other verticals, such as open drones, or data analytics. We’ll facilitate and support them through Kambria to push for the development of the tech themselves
What is your plan of raising fund? Any accredited funds?
We are wrapping up our token sale right now with the pre-sale. We have the backing of several accredited and well-known funds such as Hashed from Korea, Bamboo Capital and Kucoin from Greater China, Dragon Capital from Vietnam, Bitzantin from Taiwan, Amplify from India, etc. We have opened our white-listing for our pre-sale, and will close it out soon to prepare for token distribution.
The market is bearish but Kambria (and TomoChain) is still moving forward strongly. What are strategies of Kambria to encourage holders to hold Kambria token longer and to increase the demand for using Kambria token?
Token holders who use KAT to stake behind good projects on Kambria, or invest into those projects, will get rewarded with KARMA. And as the technology capabilities on Kambria grow, we can deploy more robots into new markets, generate more revenue, which in turn will be shared with the Karma holders. We believe the potential markets will be trillion dollar worth with Kambria disrupting all the traditional services from home, to restaurants, to hospitals. So this long-term reward, will help incentivize our token holders to hold and participate actively on Kambria.
What is the advantage for a token holder in the short and long term and will it have any reward structure for active members ?
KAT token holders can use the tokens to buy AI/robotics services and technology on Kambria, can get access to beta or pilot programs, can vote and invest into projects that are most compelling for them. And as they participate actively on Kambria, they will get rewarded KARMA tokens, which will then give them a share of the revenue generated from Kambria through licensing fee.
I noticed that Kambria has been organizing hackathons at universities like UC Berkeley, Stanford, and several other major schools in North America. Why are hackathons important to Kambria?
Running hackathons is absolutely crucial to us. It is a great way to introduce developers to AI and Robotics, to spark their interest, and to get some of the best talents out there to work on our platform. We will follow up soon with education programs, and other initiatives to continue the momentum. Our approach is inspired from the DARPA grand challenge for self-driving car, which only cost DARPA $2M in prize, but it jumpstarted the entire self-driving industry, which several billion dollar companies coming out of that challenge.
Kambria and TomoChain Partnership
Why did Kambria choose to partner with TomoChain? How does the TomoChain and Kambria partnership help both projects?
TomoChain is developing one of the best infrastructure out there in the space with a lot of innovative ideas. As I mentioned above, some of the key features that TomoChain developing are essential to building a healthy and sustainable open innovation ecosystem. And Long Vuong is a really knowledgeable and helpful advisor as well. He has been playing a tremendous role in helping out other blockchain projects, especially the ones coming out of Vietnam.
Is Kambria going to run on TomoChain at mainnet?
Kambria is chain-agnostic, so we can deploy on any chain infrastructure. We are seriously considering TomoChain at mainnet. TomoChain has some of the really interesting features that will be very beneficial to Kambria.
Is Kambria planning to run masternode(s) on TomoChain?
Definitely a strong possibility.
About Kambria
Kambria is an open innovation blockchain project that enables and incentivizes collaboration in R&D, manufacturing, and commercialization of advanced technology. They are developing our own public chain with protocols uniquely designed to address the current waste and inefficiencies in today’s innovation model.
Website: kambria.io
