July 19 - Nebula AI AMA Highlights and Monthly Report
Nebula AI hosted the July AMA session on July 19th. CEO, Charles Cao updated community members with project and business progress, as well as answered questions from the community.
Starting this month, we will be combining the AMA highlights and Monthly reports together.
Business Progress
Updated the Orion Cloud nbai.io website content.
This change includes the new pricing list. We have changed the pricing in order to compete with other competitors. Despite these price changes, we still have highly cost-effective advantages.
Consult the pricing page to see all the changes
Integrated the Orion Script Converter to the Orion Notebook
With the Orion Notebook will convert your scripts. Users will no longer have to follow extensive and complicated steps. Simply input all the required parameters and the Orion Script Converter will convert your script.
Integration of Orion Script Converter to the Notebook is convenient and time-efficient for large-scale machine learning, once your script is converted to Orion script, users can directly start training on the Orion platform with no additional steps.
Cygnus Storage Solution is now online.
Users now have access to their own individual storage. The Cygnus Cloud Storage Service allows users to upload or download scripts in the new interface. Each user has a stable and independent permanent storage space that results in data isolation. This improves security and addresses concerns of enterprise users on data security. By default each user has 10GB of storage, however users can request additional storage by contacting us.
With the launch of new storage systems, Orion has a complete suite of AI services: real-time training, data storage and large-scale machine learning services.
Web storage can store data in a stable environment and long-term manner. Orion is pre-loaded with a large number of machine learning libraries. Users can perform efficient GPU calculations in real time. High-performing computing tasks that require higher GPU processing can be assigned as tasks through smart contract sharing calculation. With this complete suite of services, Orion has reached large-scale commercial standards.
To access the Cygnus Storage System, you can login to your dashboard and from there click the “Cygnus Storage” in the sidebar. You will be shown your access key, secret and URL. If your access key has been exposed you can always refresh to generate a new access. By clicking “Entry Cygnus” you will be directed to your storage container.
Integrated Ledger for multiple region user
When you login to the Orion platform, users can select a region on the top-right corner, instead of switching during individual instance creation.
Orion Notebook supports NBAI Payment
Once free-trial period is complete, users will be able to pay by NBAI when using the Orion Notebook. Pricing for the Notebook will be released soon, pricing will be similar as instance cost.
Business Progress
East-China Data Center
Contract signed with an East-China data center has been completed. Implementation will be done by next month and released alongside the data center management solution. With this data center, we plan to lend computing resources primarily to Universities in Montreal, Toronto and California.
We also have signed with a data center in Canada, we estimate that launch sometime at the end of the month.
Visited Montreal Universities
Visited several Montreal Universities, of whom took great interest in our project and platform. We will begin discussion next week.
Ad material preparation
We have been working on ad materials and meeting materials for future events and future partners.
Exchanges
Exchange applications still continue. The exchanges who have contacted us required additional documentation, which the business development team and Charles are working on completing.
Achievements
We have received government funding from the Canadian Scientific Research and Experimental Development (SR&ED). The funding covers 35% of our research program.
Our community administrator, Hao wrote a short article regarding the funding which you can read on Medium.
Future Plans
New Nebula-AI website
A new Nebula-ai.com website will be launched by the end of July.
Upcoming Business trips
We will be visiting companies in San Francisco and Toronto for business partnership purposes.
Social Media Marketing and Product Promotion.
A major focus for the month will be social media marketing and product promotion. We will be working on creating more content such as:
- Content creation through articles describing the experience from customers and partners using our platform.
- Social media campaigns on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and Chinese social media platforms.
- Referral Plan for the Orion Platform, users who refer friends will receive bonus hours for using GPU resources on our platform.
- Promotional plan such as working closely with enterprises who are interested in our product and services.
- Target goal next month is to take the Montreal Universities market.
Q&A
What did the CRA have to say on the nature of the project being “crypto” and powered by tokens traded on crypto exchanges?
This is not a serious concern for them. The SR&ED look at criteria such as “is it advanced technology”, “does it focus on development” “does it solve problems”. As for the Canada Revenue Agency, it will not matter if a project is using digital currency or credit card to purchase AI computing power. We pay taxes according to the regulations and standards of the CRA. Cryptocurrency is considered an asset, which needs to be reported.
What is the purchase process behind the scenes when using credit card payment to buy NBAI tokens?
We first convert the credit card payment to NBAI tokens in an NBAI pool, and then we will purchase the NBAI tokens from exchanges. If you were to check the backend of our payment system, there is no direct payment to any exchanges by credit cards, it will always be by tokens.
