Researching AI at Vancouver's fastest growing startup

Backstory

Durable is an AI website builder startup based in Vancouver. I was brought on to help integrate AI image services into their app.

Since I’m also based in Vancouver, I met up with the founder and CEO for coffee. We talked about his vision for a stock photo generator tailored to their website builder. After a few follow-up calls, we finalized the requirements and kicked off the project.

The Project & Requirements

The goal was to build an AI-powered stock image generator specifically for landing page hero sections. The key constraint: the generated image couldn’t interfere with the overlay text — it had to support the content, not compete with it.

With that in mind, I designed a system that met both their technical and business needs. I modified the internals of an open-source model — Stable Diffusion — and implemented a technique from a research paper to create a positional stock photo generator that could adapt image composition based on text layout.

By cropping the attention maps of the words 'yellow car' in early timesteps, we can control the position of the object.

Generation results from attention map editing

Durable handles around 2.1 billion API requests per month. So the solution needed to be production-ready: fast, reliable, and cost-effective at scale.

As part of the handoff, I provided:

A deployment plan
A cost breakdown of cloud GPU providers
An optimized API server that could handle their production traffic levels

Once I completed the frontend integration based on their designs, the project was handed off to their internal engineering team.

Putting it all together, we have a service that generates stock photos with space on the left side for text

Afterward, I continued working with Durable on additional generative AI projects, including a professional headshot generator and enhancements to their AI service suite.