I've been working with Vana as designer and frontend engineer for about a year. In that time we've built almost a dozen product prototypes as we navigate the idea maze of what secured data personalisation might look like in the age of AI.
One of those prototypes was Portrait: a web app that provides text-to-image generations—using a GPT large language model—based on one's personal likeness. The original version of Portrait was released in September 2022 after 7 days of development. It took off and we've been iterating on it ever since.
Working at Vana has been fascinating for two primary reasons. The first is that we're building products with a technology that is very new to consumer-level applications: AI. The two-fold conundrum, which Portrait has so far navigated, is figuring out how AI can be used within software products successfully, as well as how AI products may impact typical users unaware of the power AI has right now, let alone the near future.
The second reason is that after spending my prior career in Australian and English cultures, joining the highly skilled and ambitious Vana engineering team has been incredibly energising. Being San Francisco based, we share a company culture where there is a willingness to challenge the status quo and take on hard problems with unusual speed.
Visit Vana Portrait.