On Wednesday, 09 Dec 2020, we had a great pleasure to have Dr. Thuc Vu - CEO of Kambria join LuaSwap community for an exclusive AMA. TomoChain is pleased to partner with Kambria as a strategic partner and has Thuc Vu as our advisor. Kambria is the first blockchain project to build an open innovation platform and protocol to enable and incentivize collaborations in R&D, manufacturing, and commercializing advanced technology with an initial focus on AI & Robotics applications in the consumer space. In this AMA, LuaSwap users truly gained a huge bundle of information on Kambria project and its progress, future plan and the partnership with TomoChain, and KAT token’s potentials as well.
Below is a summary of the AMA.
Host: Hi everyone, welcome to our AMA with latest project on LuaSwap. Today I’m pleased to be joined by Mr. Thuc Vu from Kambria. Could you introduce a bit about your self and Kambria project Mr.Thuc?
Mr. Thuc Vu: Absolutely. 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 in July 2015.
We are super excited about Kambria as it is the first blockchain project with open innovation protocols that aim to build an open robotics and AI platform to develop real world applications with meaningful impacts. We are based in the Silicon Valley and has launched our MVP platform on mainnet. 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.
Kambria is one of the very few projects that have existing commercial products, a passionate user base, and partnerships with top universities and large corporations. Our founding team is composed of experienced entrepreneurs with previous exits (including one acquisition by Google) and deep-tech experts from Google, Stanford, and Carnegie Mellon University.
Host: Awesome, I personally really admire your achievements a Thuc. No need to wait longer, we will move to questions from community.
Q&A Section
Q: Can you share with us some of the unique features of Innovation services? As I know, some Innovation platforms often use AI to calculate users’ credit scores, I think it’s great, do you have plans to build mechanisms like this?
How is Kambria development going? Can you describe in detail current development efforts, market expansion plans, expected applications, and when will they become commercially available? (Telegram user name @painamong)
Mr. Thuc Vu: This is a great question! Kambria’s Open Innovation Platform is very unique in that we are sharing technology with the world to not only build on top of, but to benefit humankind as a whole. We essentially provide the tools that allow developers and enterprise companies to create new frontier technologies without having to build everything from scratch, which costs millions of dollars in research and development. Additionally, everything that is built on our platform will be eventually open source, so products built on Kambria will have the opportunity to benefit a much larger portion of the population. You can look at us as the Linux of emerging technologies. Both robotics and AI are far too impactful to only be in the hands of a handful of powerful companies, so our aim is to decentralize development and empower developers and enterprise companies to launch their ideas to the mainstream (and the world).
Here is an example: if an enterprise company has a new idea for a medical robot, rather than have to spend years of their time developing it from the ground up, they are able to create bounties or hackathons to utilize the thousands of developers in our dev community to launch their idea off the ground, as well as utilize already existing technologies as a base to build on top of. By having high entry requirements (especially cost & time) to get started developing a new product, innovation is greatly stifled. We are changing that.
This means that companies, and the developers they work with, will only be tasked with building the last 10-20%. This benefit will save them absurd amounts of money and time while providing talented developers an opportunity to earn lucrative rewards and develop their professional careers. From ideation, to development, manufacturing, and launch - our platform provides all of the resources to make this a reality, at a fraction of the cost.
We have made a lot of good progress so far in building out our platform as well as the community. For example, last year we successfully hosted the Vietnam AI Grand Challenge in conjunction with the Vietnamese government’s Ministry of Science & Technology and the Ministry of Planning & Investment with thousands of people participating. This year, due to the pandemic, we have moved a lot of our activities online. We worked alongside of McKinsey & Company, VietAI, and the Vietnam Innovation Network to deliver a series of educational workshops, online AI class, and a series of programming challenges for people to prove their skills, and get hired into exciting projects.
Q: KAMBRIA team is formed by various researchers, computer science PhDs, mathematicians and cryptographers. As you seem to be a research focused project, are there any unique inventions that you can talk about (Telegram user name @CryptoFreed0mm)
Mr. Thuc Vu: That’s a very keen perception. Even though the team seem to have a lot of R&D focused names, we have a rather large list of notable backers, partners, and sponsors that we are working with. You can take a look at them here.
However, the main focus of Kambria is definitely on commercializing real products. We have started incubating several products with strong potential markets. For example, we partner with our sister company OhmniLabs to build robotics solutions for large corporations such as Toppan or ANA. Or one of the projects coming out of our Hackathon last year was acquired by VTI, a international conglomerate on F&B. This project is helping to provide autonomous assistant for F&B stores.
If you are from Vietnam, you might have recognize VTI with their brands of Highland Coffee, or Pho 24. So the commercial opportunity here is huge.
Q: Can you briefly explain how the Top milestones that the Kambria’s team aims to execute before the end of this year or going to execute in future, will help them succeed and What Kambria may look like in 2021 and beyond? (Telegram user name @pepethefirstt)
Mr. Thuc Vu: Since this year is coming to an end very soon, pls let me talk more about next year. 2020 has been a crazy year btw, so many tragic things have happened. But I am hopeful that our crypto space will end 2020 with a strong note!
Our main focus for 2021 will be to continue building out a strong developer community. We have several activities surrounding this such as educational programs, online quizzes, and hackathons.
We are quite excited about some of the courses we will bring online, such as robotics and blockchains programming. Maybe a collaboration on a course with our dear TomoChain partner as well.
We also start to build in more utilities into our KATs. You will be able to purchase services and access cool contents from Kambria using KAT, for example, the Mentorship program in which we will pair you with really experienced entrepreneurs and technologists.
And last but not least, initiatives surrounding our tokens. We are planning a big token burn by the end of the year. So pls stay tuned for that.
Q: Do you have any plans to attract non-crypto investors to #your project Because it is the success of a project to get more investors who are still not in the crypto world. What are the plans to increase awareness around your in non-crypto space? (Telegram user name @vssaver)
Mr. Thuc Vu: This is a really good question. IMHO, exposure to non-crypto space is one of the keys for crypto projects to get mass adoption! We have several plans to help increase awareness from non-crypto investors/partners. One of the main values of Kambria is to help corporations to build the technologies that they need. So for 2021, we will focus on finding more of those partners. Let me give you some examples.
We are working with several large conglomerates in Vietnam to build out an innovation hub. Details coming very soon. But essentially we will be helping the largest auto-maker in Vietnam, and a big bank, to build out new technology to help them with digital transformation process.
Another example is on the HR front. Kambria has been building a strong developer community, and this has great synergy with companies that are looking for talents to help them develop new deep tech solutions.
We are in discussion with a large HR company from Japan, to help them with both the talent input and with training, improving their recruits’ skills
Q: Does KAT have any Coin Burn / BuyBack systems or any Token Burn plans to increase the value of Token & attract Investors to Stake to invest? (Telegram user name @ungmil)
Mr. Thuc Vu: We have several plan in place. We are burning another 600M KAT by the end of year, essentially bringing the total number of tokens burned to 1.9B, out of the total 5B tokens supply.
The new supply will be 3B, with 1.3B in circulation. The remaining is locked up. We have BuyBack systems as well, with the revenue coming from our services and initiatives.
Live Q&A Section
Q: What are your major goals to archive in the next 3-4 years? Where can we see Kambria Ecosystem in this period? What are your plans to expand and gain more adoption? (Telegram user name @joy19x)
Mr. Thuc Vu: Our main goals in the next 3-4 year is to create something similar to Linux platform, in which we have thousands of developers collaborating in developing new cool technologies, and many corporations commercializing these techs and paying back to the community. The Ecosystem should be completely fleshed out by then. To get there, as I mentioned above, the key is to focus on building a strong developer community, getting corporate partners onboard and building the right techs for commercialization.
Q: Where can I buy KAT ? Also, what are the benefits in the long-term for stakeholders? Why should we invest in KAT? (Telegram user name @jessekerluke)
Mr. Thuc Vu: You can buy KAT from MXC. Stakeholders have multiple benefits. One is that you can now stake KAT with Luaswap pool to get rewards 
This is why we are very excited about our partnership with Luaswap. Besides that, KAT holders will also receive rewards in Karma, which is kinda like our internal gaming credit system. You can unlock more rewards, more reps, access more exclusive contents or events through Karma.
Q: What is your long-term vision about the industry which your team are working on? Are you afraid some day there will be another project with more innovative technology can replace and encourage your project? (Telegram user name @starshades007)
Mr. Thuc Vu: AI & Robotics are changing the world, especially now with the pandemic. It’s never the same again. However, we believe AI & Robotics technology is too important to belong to a very few big corporations. That would lead to abuse of their powers. So we want to decentralize these techs, helping people not only building them together, but also giving them access to advanced techs and utilize them (in a positive way of course).
We are actually not worried about getting replaced by another competitors. The way we have designed Kambria is that other innovation projects could become our partners and we can all share the benefits together.
Q: Liquidity is the challenge of decentralized exchanges, how does Kambria solve this problem? Apparently, many blockchain projects are not solving any real problem, they just exist to sell their tokens. What problems exactly is Kambria solving, and solutions are you provide?
Mr. Thuc Vu: #1. Luaswap!!! You guys are awesome!
#2. Kambria is solving the challenges of developing deep techs for real-world applications. Traditionally this has been way off-limit for independent developers or small companies. We create an open innovation platform so that people can come together and collaborate to develop, deploy, and commercialize techs together.
More about Kambria
Telegram: https://t.me/kambriaofficial
Website: https://kambria.io/
Facebook: https://facebook.com/KambriaNetwork
Twitter: https://twitter.com/KambriaNetwork