Duck Tales: How we've made it easier to generate images privately in Duck.ai (Ep.33)

In this episode, Beah (Chief Product Officer) and Matej (Engineering) discuss the evolution of image generation in Duck.ai, UX improvements, and the challenge of balancing output quality and speed. Disclaimers: (1) The audio, video (above), and transcript (below) are unedited and may contain minor inaccuracies or transcription errors. (2) This website is operated by Substack. This is their privacy policy.If you have feedback on Duck Tales, or episode ideas, email us at podcast@duckduckgo.comBeah: Hi, welcome to Duck Tales, where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo and discuss the stories, technology, and people that help build privacy tools for everyone. In each episode, you’ll hear from employees about our vision, product updates, engineering, or approach to AI. Today I’m here with Matej, and we’re going to talk about image generation in Duck.ai. I will let Matej introduce himself, but quickly I’ll just say that if you haven’t met me yet, I’m Beah, I’m on the product team here at DuckDuckGo. And yeah, Matej, take it away. Tell us a little bit about yourself.Matej: All right, Matej. I’ve been at DuckDuckGo for a year and a half now, and I’m working on Duck.ai and I work primarily on image generation last year from September until Christmas.Beah: Awesome. Well, okay, so just to kind of get started, tell me a little bit about what that even means. What is image generation in Duck.ai? And if you’re able, I I think a demo would be great.Matej: Yep, definitely. Let me share my screen here. All right. So if you go to the Duck.ai, go to the Duck.ai and you will see basically this screen and you probably notice that there’s this option new image, which is when you click on it, then you type any prompt in here. Duck.ai will try to generate an image for you. So let’s show me an image of a cat on the windows. So hopefully at the end of this we’ll get an image. This is going to take a little while because image generation is quite a heavy process. Yeah, this is the simplest form of it.Beah: Okay. I see it. It’s coming together.Matej: We’re getting, yes, it’s coming together and here’s our little cat. can click on it, zoom on it, download the image and copy it if we need it. Or we can keep it writing on it and ask for adjustments in the image.Beah: That’s pretty good. Good. I mean it has like the right number of limbs. There’s nothing too crazy going on here. I’m pretty impressed. do you wanna demo like any adjustments or anything else you wanna point out while your screen’s being shared?Matej: Yes, that’s correct. Sure, we can try it. Add another cat to the image. Let’s see what it comes up with.Beah: Okay. another cat. yeah. Cool. And what what model is operating here?Matej: So, we’re currently using GPT Image 2 model. We’ve been through multiple iterations of this and it’s always been a trade-off between cost, the output quality and the performance, so how quick the model is. We went through GPT Image 1, 1.5, 1 Mini and 2. Currently the GPT Image 2 model is slower, however it... the output quality is much, much better than previously. You probably cannot see it in images like this. However, if you would prompt it to generate a text, then you would see a clear difference between different models, and GPT Image 2 follows instructions really well and generates the text really well.Beah: Hmm. Got it. So like a bad job if you say if you tell it to put some copy in an image is like it doesn’t get the letter. It like uses different copy, it like mangles the letters. Is that right? Yeah. I’ve definitely been there. But hey, look, this cat also has the right number of limbs. I don’t see anything problematic or fishy about this. I guess it’s kind of a s a softball query, because there’s plenty of cat images onMatej: Exactly, exactly. That’s the case. Yeah.Beah: In in Windows online, huh? Yeah. A demo query. Nice. Cool. okay, awesome. Well tell tell me a little bit, like stepping back again, tell me a little bit about why we even built image generation.Matej: That’s correct, yes. Yes. So I think from the outset, we knew that we will have to at some point. The reason for that is mos