Neuromation CEO Yashar Behzadi at the AMA session

As the Neuromation Platform develops and our team grows, we start a new series of Ask Me Anything sessions in our Telegram chat. This week we have had a special guest — newly appointed CEO Yashar Behzadi has joined the session in order to answer questions from Neuromation community. We have picked the most interesting questions for those who have missed the live session.

Why did you accept the job of CEO, and what attracted you to Neuromation?

Neuromation is at the nexus of transformative trends in AI, blockchain, and token economy. I think there is a great opportunity to create real value and drive toward our vision of democratizing AI. I was impressed by the team’s vision, passion, and ability to execute and am excited for the journey ahead.

What are your main priorities for the next 6 months and the next 3 years?

My priorities are 3 fold to support our mission to transform industries with AI by connecting, empowering, and growing the AI ecosystem. We have a number of key initiative to achieve our goals including community development, marketplace experience, and the creation of technologies and tools to make it easier and cheaper to build AI solutions.

In the next 6 months we will be focused on the customer experience and building the necessary tech to support them. Our main customers are enterprise companies looking to transform and reimagine their business with AI and AI/software developers looking for a platform to ease development by bringing together data assets, models, and other developers together.

In 3 years, our goals are to have a robust marketplace servicing 10’s of thousands of clients and being a disruptive force in the AI ecosystem rivaling the likes of the major platform companies.I am optimistic the latter can be achieved as the traditional competitive barriers related to access of talent and data will be disrupted by a global marketplace of talent and synthetic data technologies.

What’s the most important message you’d like to communicate to NTK holders?

I would like NTK holders to know that we are building real solutions and technologies and are committed to serving our stakeholders which include NTK holders and our customers. We have a terrific team that is continuing to grow and is passionate about our vision.

What is your strategy to bring blockchain technology to the mainstream?

Blockchain tech will be transformative for many industries, and in our case it will enable us to build a disrupted marketplace with granular controls on data & models allowing developers and data providers to control and monetize their contributions. Our philosophy is to build technologies that are necessary to service the needs of the customer.

I think too often technology companies try to find applications for technology versus focusing on the customer problems and building the right technologies to solve their problems. It’s the difference between being customer-focused and tech-focused.

What areas are we prioritizing for AI?

There are a great number of opportunities, and frankly every sector will ultimately be transformed by AI much as the internet, smartphones, and cloud-based systems have changed how businesses are run. Our specific initial technical focus will be in computer vision & synthetic data in the retail, industrial automation (manufacturing and robots) and biomedical areas. However, we have initiatives and pending customers from the financial sector, chat bots, ag-tech, etc. It’s very exciting

How will you motivate your customers to use the Neurotoken?

NTK are used on the platform for AI development, data, and compute. Every engagement and partnership is based on NTK utilization which in turn will drive the value to the network and token. We will drive customers to our platform through results. When our customer succeed, we succeed and that will drive the ecosystem development. More tactically, we will leverage various channels of customer acquisition and in parallel work directly with AI developers and data partners to build the marketplace community.

Can you tell me the number of projects that have started using the Neuromation platform?

We have a number of live clients on the platform and I can say we easily have a list of dozens of companies, from recognized global brands to small/mid size companies, working with us. We expect to accelerate the rate of partnerships announcements over the coming months. It’s great validation to see the caliber of the companies in our pipeline that have reached out to us because of our expertise. We have a great team!

Was NTK the project that aims for not pre programmed AI?

We are building a marketplace for AI which includes AI developers building custom solutions, previously developed models available via an API, data providers, and compute. We aim to be the global destination for the AI ecosystem.

Are you going to hire experts from Nvidia and other great companies like Baidu and Alphabet?

We are always looking for the best talent and will absolutely be growing our internal team. The great thing about building a marketplace is that over time we hope to have all the great AI talent participating and building solutions. The combined power of a global community of AI developers will ultimately be greater than of any individual company no matter how dominant they may be today.

Do you have plans to also deliver solutions for academic research? Would be a nice opportunity to advertise and perhaps get talents directly from the university.

Yes, we have already met with a number of significant academic institutions. It is my goal to bring all AI developers (professional or academic) into the platform. There is great work occurring by students and our marketplace will allow them to be discovered and monetize their work.

And where are the NTK tokens used for?

There are several technologies that I think are important to AI in the near-term. Synthetic data is a disruptive technology as it removes traditional barriers to obtain high-quality data. I recently spoke to Wired and Techcrunch about this topic and it was very well received. Second, distributed computing is key to reducing cost and improving access. Finally our marketplace will accelerate AI development by making it easy for AI developers to collaborate and build on one another’s innovation. Very exciting times ahead

Where do you see Neuromation in 5–10 years?

I am excited for the future and I want to see us become the global destination for all things AI. I want every AI developer and software developer to use us on a daily basis in their work and I wanted enterprise companies to come to us first. That would translate to thousands of unique NTK transactions every day and the delivering of great solutions.

Why should NTK be built on blockchain?

Blockchain as unique advantages for granular control of data and models. The distributed nature also enables quick, cheap global microtransactions allowing everyone to participate in the AI economy.

Can Neuro make AI robot like ‘Ex Machina’

The future will surely surprise us all however I think the real value of AI will be in how it combines with human capability. I think AI+human will be more capable than AI-alone.

We would like to thank everyone for the great questions! And we look forward to chatting with you all again soon with our CTO Artyom Astafurov. Keep an eye on our announcement channel to not miss this opportunity!