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Machine learning, large language models, and artificial intelligence are familiar terms to many, yet deeply comprehended by only a select few. While the intricate workings of the technologies driving today’s advancements might elude the general public, their impact on everyday life is undeniable and ever-growing.
Chris Gomes Muffat’s work has played a significant role in the public consumer base’s access to complex technology. Former tech security expert, Muffat, has dived deep into the world of AI. He has launched three products and received seven patents on AI.
“My philosophy for product design is simple: it needs to be easy to sell, deploy and scale, and adopt,” he explains. “The user should be able to connect to the app and intuitively understand how it works without requiring a training session.”
There’s nothing simple about creating a product people will return to. The ability to do that is the difference between a business that thrives or sinks.
Chris Muffat’s three AI companies — Promptify.com, FocalStudio, and Aithos — have plenty of excellent practices other businesses can emulate. For example, ensuring that a product has revolutionary features is one way to win over its users.
“You can’t tell GPT to write 200 pages about some topic. It can only give you an answer at a maximum of about 4000 words,” explains Muffat. “When working with GPT, the limitation of the instructions given is a technical issue. The number of words in the response is another restriction. These factors are crucial to address to improve the overall user experience.”
And address them they did — Muffat and his engineers are on a mission to let Promptify.com’s users create those 200-page novels. They didn’t stop there, either — Promptify.com has its sights on providing up-to-date information and requiring additional context from the user when needed.
With the FocalStudio tool, the premise is different — it fremedies the issues that are time-consuming and sometimes costly to create product photos that work well in online ads. There’s usually plenty of testing involved in doing something like that, but FocalStudio makes it easy. “It’s essentially a platform that automatically generates images to maximize advertising conversion rates,” explains Muffat.
It’s always a good idea to remove the friction points that stand in the way of people using the product effectively. Muffat believes that apps should be used and approached intuitively without needing instructions.
That doesn’t mean he’ll use the same type of user interface on all his products, though. FocalStudio gives instructions to the app that is handled through a conversation with a chatbot. With Promptify.com, there are fields to fill out, sliders to slide, and buttons to press. In both cases, the controls are self-explanatory.
As a final touch of user-centricity, adding a feature that speaks to their values can be a nice touch. That’s what Muffat did with Aithos. “One of its main features is a “solar branch,” which benchmarks, tests, and rates available AI from an ethical viewpoint,” he explains. “It measures potential bias against people’s needs, providing an ethical score to help users make informed decisions when choosing an AI provider.”
The past is full of businesses that believed in their vision but failed to deliver a product people would buy. Whether by one-upping the competition, finding what their customers need, or aligning with their values, Chris Muffat and his trio of companies seem to be on the right track to avoiding the path so many businesses take into oblivion.
