The Career Transformation from AI to Blockchain
Dolphin Ask interviews the Bottos Co-founder, Miss Wang Tingting.
Hello, welcome to another Dolphin Ask’s Monday interview. This week, Meng Zhu, will bring you on a walk through the world of Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence (AI) and will make you experience the scent of coding, thus we have invited the co-founder of Bottos, Miss. Wang Tingting, ex vice president of one of the China’s first blockchain projects and ex vice president of ScreamTec, so let us listen to her opinions about AI and Blockchain.
First of all, let me present Miss Wang Tingting, with double bachelor degrees in computer science and business management at the Huazhong Science and Technology university. Besides, as the founder of Bottos, Miss Wang Tingting is not only a blockchain expert, an artificial intelligence geek, and a serial entrepreneur, but has also much research and development experience on robotic exoskeletons and smart home products. She has worked as vice president of one of the first blockchain project in China and as vice president of ScreamTec.
The Founder Background
Dolphin: You previously were the vice-president of Xiaoyi, why did you leave it and put yourself on a new path? As I know, Xiaoyi also operates in the Blockchain domain and they’re not bad, and their market value is relatively high.
Wang Tingting: Before replying to this question, I want to first describe my experience at Xiaoyi. There, I used to work in the AI field, specifically in the research and development of exoskeletons, devices that are able to help elderly and disable people to walk. These products burn a lot of investments, thus at the time we had two companies, one providing online marketing and another manufacturing robots. The online marketing company returned a few millions of profits every year, which had been all invested in robotics, finally everyone realized that the necessary investment in robot was really high. Of course, this also reflects the state of capital investment in the entire artificial intelligence industry, which start-ups cannot afford. As the first company producing robotic exoskeleton in China, there were indeed a lot of whimsy inside the company, but it was really very hard, and I thought that it had encountered bottlenecks and can’t anymore.
Later with more knowledge about Xiaoyi, I thought that blockchain might have been helpful to the development of the artificial intelligence industry, so I left this artificial intelligence company and joined Xiaoyi. I started to do research, and I still think that artificial intelligence is the future, but the development of artificial intelligence now has encountered many bottlenecks. During this period, I discovered some features of the blockchain, such as its open sourced nature and, indeed, many of the artificial intelligence code is actually open source. So I thought that blockchain may actually solve some AI development problems. After joining Xiaoyi I realized that they were great, it is considered the first company to start a blockchain project in China and the whole team’s atmosphere was great. Later, I came up with the idea of creating Bottos, then I started it independently.
Blockchain + AI Mainstream
Dolphin: In December 2017, Artificial Intelligence was selected as one of the “Top Ten Chinese Media Keywords in 2017”. Although the concept of artificial intelligence has already got into the homes of ordinary people, yet everybody is lacking further understanding of it and don’t even know the current stage of artificial intelligence in the domestic or global world. Can you analyze it and share your opinions with us?
Wang Tingting: In fact, AI has been trending earlier than blockchain, however it is still at a very early stage. For example, the robotic exoskeleton project I worked with before, although it is now worth three hundred million RMB, it is still a relatively junior product. Artificial intelligence is still at an early stage concept, although there are some companies with more powerful resources creating a lot of good products, such as speech recognition, semantic recognition and graphic image recognition, etc., the application of these technologies is currently developing very well. Moreover, today’s AI applications are just a drop of water of those we will enjoy in the future. For example, speech recognition. The mandarin recognition may be very good, but we know that human language is very complicated with different dialects everywhere. If we only would make Chinese dialects as different patterns, that would already be a great innovation. And there are still some new areas that have not been expanded yet. Some time ago, a company that made soothing robots wanted to work with us and needed to collect data such as door-closing sounds. They wanted the robot to sense whether the owner’s emotions were of happiness or angriness at the moment the owner closed the door, so they needed to collect closing door sounds to train the AI model. This is just an example, there will be more fun applications of AI in the future. In this respect, artificial intelligence is still a very early stage, just like the blockchain.
Dolphin: Artificial intelligence is actually a very cutting-edge technology and now it can be combined with another cutting-edge technology like blockchain. This is very interesting. So, how will the blockchain empower artificial intelligence?
Wang Tingting: AI is indeed cutting edge technology and has already become strategically crucial to every country, because everyone thinks that it will be the future economic driver. For example, professor Wu Enda maintained that human beings discovered the electric energy and it changed our lives. Whereas we had to rely on carriages, now we have cars. Nowadays you can have a driverless car equipped with AI. So artificial intelligence is the future, this is a common consensus. Regardless of the country or the individual, I suppose that artificial intelligence will change the future of our economic life. Some people say that blockchain and artificial intelligence are at a very early stage, that are very “virtual”, and the combination of the two is even more “virtual.” The current situation is this: although blockchain development also has some technical problems to be solved, as well as artificial intelligence, the current blockchain technology level can solve some of the problems faced by artificial intelligence, such as the one just mentioned. Data and blockchain technology can provide artificial intelligence with more accurate and efficient data, even data that is difficult to get through existing mechanisms. Therefore, I know that blockchain and artificial intelligence are now on the same path.
The Bottos Performance
Dolphin: We’ve checked out the performance of Bottos in the secondary market and we have noticed that the current price of the Bottos coin is already below the issue price. Because of this, we think you would probably feel under pressure. I think at this time, there will be many people who want to hear your points of view about your project.
Wang Tingting: : Actually, we cannot say much because the main goal of the project is to do its best to build the products and the AI ecosystem. And it is not only Bottos, but also many other blockchain projects are under such pressure, since the current market environment is not particularly favorable. But I think that the lack of satisfaction here is due to last year’s strong gains, so this year’s correction is understandable. Regarding the fluctuations in the market and prices, it possesses its own inherent laws. Bottos’ current commitment to investors is: to do our best to successfully create the products and build up the ecosystem. Bottos is fueled by artificial intelligence, so as long as the AI common consensus will not fade away in the future, the market will heat up again and this pressure will gradually be eliminated.
Dolphin: I would have never imagined or expected that there are around 30 companies with blockchain and AI projects. And among them there are some of your direct competitors. As an insider, how do you see competition in the industry?
Wang Tingting: Even though the number of companies in the AI sector is quite large, this project occupies a big proportion. For example, there are some blockchain companies that make VR games that tend to be included in the AI sector; also, there could be some tech companies that, because of some relations with the AI, they put themselves in the AI industry. Bottos is the first blockchain company in the world to propose the concept of combining artificial intelligence with blockchain. What we do at Bottos is to create an AI infrastructure.
For instance, taking as example of the electric energy and AI that I just raised, if we want to connect thousands of households, we must lay the foundations for power stations, power supply networks, etc. Bottos is now doing something similar to power stations and power grids. Through blockchain technology, we hope that in the future, AI can connect to thousands of households like electricity and change our lives. This is what we have been doing so far. At present, there are not many projects in the blockchain industry doing this, and few companies have much strength to do it. Our Bottos technological team was previously responsible for the 5G and distributed storage at Huawei, with strong R&D capabilities and solid industry experience. The strength of the Bottos tech team gives it the ability to achieve our goals.
AI in our lives
Dolphin: Let’s talk about some easy topics. How much do you think artificial intelligence will participate in our lives? Is it true that one day we may talk and communicate with smart machines fluently, and the kind of communication that will include the emotions?
Wang Tingting: I just mentioned that artificial intelligence will change our lives just as electricity did more than a hundred years ago, but we still have a long way to enter this stage. Just like the popular, self-driving shuttle bus used in airports or on limited range roads, etc., artificial intelligence is the core behind the scenes to change our lives and make our lives better. In the future, for sure we will be able to talk fluently with AI devices, and there are already some studies on emotional AI, just like the soothing robot that I just mentioned collecting the closing doors sounds.
Dolphin: In the news the day before yesterday, the People’s Daily shared a post on overseas social medias saying that it welcomes Google to return to mainland China. This led to a Li Yanhong’s (Baidu CEO) response, bringing up Baidu’s proud artificial intelligence. But let’s imagine, would Baidu be able to develop artificial intelligence drawing support from the blockchain technology, and then take more initiatives in direct dialogue with Google?
Wang Tingting: First of all, we applaud our government’s decision, demonstrating that it really wants to embrace the world cutting-edge technology. In fact, the vision of Bottos is the same. Bottos is a global project, and we hope to attract more excellent AI entrepreneurs from China and abroad to join our family. The benefits will be to achieve global shared AI projects and eliminate technical barriers between countries. For example, many countries now regard AI as a strategic national policy even before Trump banned Chinese companies from acquiring US AI projects. In fact, their purpose is to prevent the future from being like the semiconductor chips condition we have today, they want to avoid being controlled by us.
All the things Bottos does is in the hope that AI can be shared worldwide. There are no national borders with Bottos. Each person is a node. Each person can upload their own AI, provide data to the AI and use AI. So I think Baidu’s strategy is very good. The idea to improve its products and ecosystem through artificial intelligence is great.
An Open and Inclusive AI Platform
Dolphin: But let’s make an hypothesis, would Baidu be able to develop artificial intelligence drawing support from the blockchain technology, and then take more initiatives in direct dialogue with Google?
Wang Tingting: Perhaps I can rephrase the question: if Baidu uses blockchain technology to develop artificial intelligence, can it can become a very strong competitor of Bottos? I personally think that Baidu will not become our competitor, just like before the advent of the Internet, there were many communication companies in China. Even though they had more conditions and resources to develop on the Internet, they did not become Internet giants, so they also have a development dilemma. I think blockchain technology is not a technology limited to very large enterprises. It has risen from the bottom, the embrace of community is written in its genes, so it shows more personal strength. For example, we actually hope to attract more AI entrepreneurs to join the Bottos ecosystem. It may be possible that one of Baidu’s employees can use their spare time to compile his favorite AI on Bottos. On this respect, Bottos is a bigger platform because it is more open and more inclusive, and its resources come from the community, not just from Baidu’s database. Of course, Bottos is not only limited to data and resources, but also includes the entire AI production materials, computing power, algorithms, storage, etc. to help AI reduce its research and development costs and improve its efficiency, this is what Bottos does. Baidu may also attract AI engineers from around the world to join in the development of Baidu platform through a more open and inclusive community, but Baidu is a huge listed company. If it is going to attract global AI engineers through a currency change, I think it would encounter greater resistance, and Baidu will be at a disadvantage when it comes to fast response and flexibility compared to our native blockchain ecosystem.
Dolphin: Thanks again to Miss Wang for being our guest and bringing us so much sharing. Whether it is artificial intelligence or blockchain, or whatever breakthrough, technology will change our lives, and we expect that the combination of artificial intelligence and blockchain will make our lives better, and we also hope that Bottos may lead more Chinese companies to the international stage.
