Vana

I worked at Vana as designer and frontend engineer for a few years, helping them explore various product ideas in the crypto and AI space. In that time we built almost a dozen product prototypes as we navigated the idea maze of what secured, personalised data 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 modelbased on 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.

Late 2022, we also explored personal “daemon” chatbots based on the same personalisation data we had collected from Portrait. GPT-me was one such app from these experiments.

Working at Vana was 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 was incredibly energising. Being San Francisco based, Vana’s company culture always included a willingness to challenge the status quo and take on hard problems with unusual speed.

Visit Vana Portrait.