Last weekend Huobi Pro has held a talk with Maxim Prasolov, the CEO of Neuromation.

Here is a brief recap and the most interesting quotes :

What came first — blockchain or neural networks

Synthetic data is like animation for AI training, we create kind of a cartoon and train models inside the simulator. It needs a lot of computing power, and we take this power from the blockchain community and we believe that distributed AI is the next step in blockchain evolution.

The data is one of the major problems, the major bottleneck in the AI industry.

To train the machine learning algorithm you have to show to AI what to do, like you teach your child what a phone is, what a key is, what is a cup. In AI technologies you show an image of the key and create a description, or label it. It costs at least 20 cents for an image, and in the end you will spend millions of dollars on it. We believe that data is the new oil. We create synthetic data, which is kind of a synthetic oil for AI.

2. When and why did you decide to start using blockchain technologies?

We have computing nodes which belong to private miners all over the world. And without blockchain we would have to switch to hundreds of different jurisdictions, the contacts would be impossible. It is impossible using traditional systems. With blockchain we can do it.

3. Who are your competitors?

We don’t have competitors in synthetic data. But we have a lot of competitors in cloud-based services, like Amazon, Tensor Flow and those who use computing power for machine learning. We are like Uber for computing power. Because our competitors provide a very expensive service. We provide affordable services, and the blockchain community helps the AI community.

Neuromation development plans: We’ve raised enough funds to develop our labs and the platform, so we will open our platform for miners when our computational node is ready and open for the private miners. Now we’re working with big mining pools because we are testing the technology and the platform. We are developing a machine learning algorithm which will be available on the platform soon. Check the list here. Small and medium enterprises will be able to get Neuromation services in this Quarter of 2018. Starting from April we hope to open a new office in Asia to help the agriculture industry to improve the quality of production. This month we are starting a medical lab

4. How come your company uses proof-of-work instead of proof-of-stake?

We are using blockchain technologies but there is a big difference between traditional blockchain and useful computing. So we don’t need consensus to validate data. That’s why in the beginning we used ethereum blockchain

5. Will you be able to create a mining app to pay miners for computational power?

Yes, we are working on it, because our container can be deployed on your computational node. We are developing a hybrid node, so our computer could be switched on and off from cryptocurrency mining to useful computing and back.

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