Interview with Ziqi Chen, Cortex Labs CEO

• How was the idea of CortexLabs born?

The “Smart Contract idea” of Ethereum is an important supplement to the Blockchain world, but it cannot provide enough computing power to computing machine learning models, which are very common in centralized web apps.  We want to make a decentralized blockchain network for sma3rt AI contracts.  The idea was originated in 2016, but the maturity did not form until Aug.2017. The core team members have machine learning, number theory and blockchain technology background, we thought through the logic behind how this decentralized network can be built. All ideas are original and naturally developed.

• Can you explain to common people about your product?

CortexLabs is creating an AI blockchain ecosystem. Different from the traditional blockchain platform, which can only support simple smart contracts, the Cortex Blockchain can support much more difficult smart contracts (AI models) by solving both the technical difficulties on the hardware and software level. This is done by creating a more sophisticated computing environment (Cortex Virtual Machine) to run the AI smart contracts on GPU. this overcomes the current limitation of CPU’s computational power. With a greater improvement in computational power, Cortex gives a lot more potential to smart contract. User- case wise, Cortex is building a decentralized platform based on blockchain technology that enables users to upload their machine learning models to the public blockchain where other users can use the models to build and deploy decentralized applications.

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• As the company is carrying out ICO, what has already been done and what are you going to create on the money collected by the ICO? What are your plans after ending of the Token Sale?

We can answer these two questions together: We only held one private placement allocation and raised 40,000 Ethereum (ETH) in a month. We had signed strategic agreement Cryptic Labs to have Prof. Diffie serve as our academic advisor. We are hiring talents to develop the blockchain that we proposed in our whitepaper, we plan to complete testnet for mining in 2018 Q3, testnet for smart AI contracts in 2019 Q1, and main chain in 2019 Q2. We are building communities and holding meetups to promote Cortex project worldwide (Taiwan, Sochi, Moscow, Korean, New York ..etc ). Now that we have completed our only round of private placement, we are in contact with the major exchange platforms and the operation team is in progress of preparing sufficient project documents, legal and audit materials for the exchange launch in the very near future.

• How does CortexLabs differ from similar services? How can your innovative service assist the new economic and technological development?

Centralized AI services usually put people into repetitive work, most of them are lead by sales, not really by the progress of science.  While our project welcome community members who commit open-source AI models, prove the advantage of their models over others’ and earn reward from contract calls. We ensure neither AI malware nor AI malfunction can appear on our chain. The AI consensus might become a new standard of currently shattered AI industry

• How can CortexLabs change the futures of commerce?

Open-sourced models on blockchain will nourish new startups and small businesses, we don’t fear any AI/data tycoons.  Additionally, we are keeping eyes on homomorphic topics such that data privacy and/or model privacy is feasible on CortexLabs’ Blockchain.

• How can anyone join CortexLabs?

Our project team is currently open for hiring. Anyone can apply through our official site. Investment wise, our only round of private placement is already completed. More tokens could be rewarded by participating in our public bounty campaign (coming soon), buying them after we get on the exchange, or become a miner when our AI blockchain ecosystem come online next year (2019 Q2, as stated in the whitepaper).

• Why do you need Token Sale?

Just like any other project in the crypto-space, unlike traditional initial public offerings, the token sale is typically used to gather fund for the project team to launch and complete the project successfully.