The Neuromation Team is always open to dialogue with our community members and strives towards a transparent business. Last week, Neuromation Chairman Constantine Goltsev and President of Digital Economy Maxim Prasolov joined our Japanese Telegram chat for an AMA session to answer your questions. We’ve picked up the most interesting questions and answers for those who missed the chance to ask them directly.

Are GANs able to use one platform alpha v0. 2? If not, when will it be available?

All types of network architectures will be able to use the platform. The platform is architecturally agnostic.

Did that mean yes to GANs?

It means yes to GANs and all other network architectures.

2. I want to ask about the API connectivity with other computer products that Max was speaking about last month on “Ivan on Tech”. I believe it’ll start off with big time customers first, but could you share the status of progress on this front as well as what kind of possible affects do you think this will have for Neuromation to get new customers?

We are planning on our API having cross functionality with other cloud resources, eventually. For now, the first version will work with basic cloud services and partner mining farms.

Large organizations store their trade secrets and research and development in their own private cloud systems. They intend to give only 15–20% of their data to public clouds, primarily unsensitive data. However, they also lack solutions for developing Artificial Intelligence. We will help them retain a Deep Learning infrastructure inside of their current R&D efforts.

3. What are your thoughts on going as a self-service platform, in order to take it the reliance of Ether? *to remove the dependency of Ether

We keep our operations on the Ethereum blockchain. We expect the Ethereum network to increase scalability and the speed of transactions per second. At the moment, Ethereum covers all of our needs and it allows us to work with a large numbers of partners, which grows our potential business prospects.

4. They say the strength of Neuro is the token economy. Could you explain in further detail where that stands and how you can differentiate yourselves from competitors?

The token economy allows us to engage mining capacities and build a distributed AI service for any private clouds or computing capacity. Classic cloud providers that don’t have tokens can’t do that. For example, they are unable to easily reserve servers in China or Latin America. We can, by moving crypto to power any private computing capacity to a deep learning infrastructure. It means the ability to “democratize AI”.

5. I don’t ask for any names, but for Japanese firms that are interested in Neuromation, what type of AI use are they interested in? Images? Words? Or something else? Also, what kind of service are they trying to get involved in?

We have some leads in Japan and we will be working to strengthen our relationship with Japanese companies. Our strong point is computer vision and language analysis. In all likelihood, these applications will be the first touchpoints for us in that region.

Approximately 70% of demand is computer vision, recognition, and detection. The life cycle to get a contract with Japanese companies takes about 4–6 months. You know your corporate bureaucracy better than we do :) We had a successful exhibition in early April, with many leads, and we are continuing our Business Development efforts in Japan with several clients.

6. Do you have any concrete plans to listing any other better exchanges?

We can’t solicit the exchanges directly as a utility token. We do, however, have strong partners who are looking at other exchanges and will move us there when the time comes.

7. Do you have concrete plans to implement strategic investment relations?

We have investment relations through our management team. We are in constant communication with our token holders and issue reports on our progress. You can’t get more strategic than that 🙂

8. Do you have concrete and logical reasons, visions on how to increase token prices, but not the ambiguous expression of “business extension”?

There is a clear business development plan. In order to purchase the Neuromation service, our clients must transact in NTK. To do that, they will need to get NTK on exchanges or from third parties. This, in turn, might affect the price. We do not engage in any price manipulation on the market.

9. Can you please explain what are the merits for average users to buy and hold NTK, except for speculative capital gain purposes?

We are partnering with companies to use NTK in their respective services. There might be a good reason to hold NTK in order to purchase these services, so our goal is to make NTK a universally-accepted unit of cryptocurrency for all AI-related tasks.

10. I think that revenue is up because there was business before the ICO, but what do you think about “revenues from existing business” and “gaining revenue from token market”? Will the burn be done on both of the revenues? Is this correct?

Burn will be done on all transactions that enter our platform. So yes, native platform demand will result in burn, and other businesses that use NTK will also generate burn events.

11. With the current market capitalization of NTK, we are worried whether costly development, personnel expenses, etc. can be covered going forward. Is it ok to assume that there is no problem on this front?

We are running a very lean startup, headed by Silicon Valley veterans as our CEO and CTO. We are in a great position to execute our vision. The token valuation is important to us, but it doesn’t affect our capacity to execute technical and business elements of our vision.

12. I would like to know if Neuromation is on track with these forecasts. Congratulations for what you have accomplished so far.

We are expecting our first “industrial strength” platform to start crystalizing in Q2- Q3 of this year and will be driving business hard to accomplish these goals. They are ambitious, but we will try to hit them.

13. It’s said that by the end of 2020, with the help of effective burn, that NTK will be worth up to be 90 times of its value. Do you have pretty good confidence on this?

We are committed to burning 50% of the tokens by 2020. If our volume of business on the platform grows as expected, then the projected level of token scarcity will have the effect. Total token values at nominal prices should be a small fraction of total demand of the platform.

14. What are your thoughts on the fact that NTK prices are dependent on the price of BTC? Also, do you feel that there is nothing to worry about for such a situation to continue going forward?

Currently, many tokens correlate with the price of BTC and ETH. As our business develops, this correlation should weaken significantly. NTK prices will be driven by demand for services on the platform.