Yury Rudnitski is a Product Manager at AIBY Group, a company specializing in developing and publishing AI-powered mobile apps. The most well-known app in his portfolio is his ChatOn, his popular AI chatbot. Yury’s core responsibilities include end-to-end oversight of the product development lifecycle.
What first attracted you to programming and software engineering?
As a student, I realized that computers offer us endless possibilities. Even elementary school students can create simple programs and end up with valuable finished products. For example, we created a program to help teachers organize school-wide timetables. The feeling of creating something of value to so many people was amazing. This is what determined my choice of field and profession.
You transitioned into product management from a software engineering background. What were the most significant challenges you faced during this transition and how did you overcome them?
Figuratively speaking, the most important task was to kill the engineer in me. In my new role, I needed to apply my product management expertise to focus on growing the product, rather than advising engineers or coming up with solutions at an engineering level. In other words, I had to learn to delegate tasks and trust experts.
Another key challenge in my new role was the need to communicate my ideas to the entire team more frequently. I had to take my public speaking skills to a whole new level because I had to hold a lot of meetings and presentations.
ChatOn has gained huge popularity for its AI-powered features. Can you talk about any specific innovations or milestones in AI that specifically influenced the development of ChatOn?
Of course, the creation of ChatOn was largely influenced by dramatic advances in the development of large-scale language models (LLMs). At some point, it became clear that this was the beginning of something new and big, and new opportunities were opening up.
The concept of chatbots is not new, but the level to which AI models can take chatbots was previously unimaginable. We took advantage of this situation and created a chatbot app based on the ChatGPT API. Since the beginning, we’ve put much more value into the app than other products can offer, and we continue to develop additional features.
In a previous interview, you emphasized the importance of starting with the user’s problem in product development. Can you share an example of how user feedback directly influenced his ChatOn’s key features and pivots?
When working on ChatOn, we pay close attention to feedback from a variety of sources. We investigate complaints made to our app store reviews and support services. Additionally, we interview users of our app and other similar apps. This approach helps us identify user needs and develop new features to address them.
For example, after analyzing our feedback, we found that users have difficulty formulating follow-up questions when interacting with chatbots. New users typically have little idea how to start exploring chatbot features.
Based on these insights, we created the “Follow-up Questions” feature. In this feature, the chatbot itself suggests question options to the user and allows them to continue the conversation. After its release, we found that the demand for it was huge. Users appreciated the quality of the questions and how they helped them explore topics in depth.
Where do you think the future of AI-powered communication apps like ChatOn will go in the next five years, especially in terms of user interaction and engagement?
Looking into the future and trying to predict how AI will evolve, I think AI will start acting as an agent between the user and the outside world. By understanding human speech, AI can now generate tasks that previously needed to be done by a human, like his JARVIS in the Marvel movies. It’s much more convenient to tell your virtual assistant by voice what events to add to your calendar, where to book your table, and when to schedule an appointment with your doctor.
More realistically, the model is already developing multimodality. It’s about the ability to accept not only text, but also images, video, and audio as input, and generate new content based on this input. For example, you can generate music from images and vice versa. This opens promising possibilities for the application of AI in various areas. Apart from content creation, AI has already made great strides in medicine and science, being able to process huge datasets and draw conclusions based on them. This is a task that would take humans years to accomplish.
As AI technology evolves rapidly, how does ChatOn address ethical concerns and ensure its technology is used for the benefit of its users?
A big challenge facing creators of both LLMs (such as OpenAI and Anthropic) and the apps built on top of them (such as ChatOn) is to make LLMs as safe as possible for end users and to ensure that the technology delivers greater benefits. It’s about guaranteeing that it will deliver.
As the creators of ChatOn, we work on the end application side. Our responsibility is to enable users to report certain ethical violations within the app. For example, if a chatbot uses inappropriate language in its responses or is rude to you or others. Once you receive such feedback, you can instruct your chatbot to avoid structures, words, or meanings that cause moral harm to users. The generative model for creating images is equipped with strict filters to prevent the generation of inappropriate content. A model that receives an unethical request will respond that it cannot create an image for that request.
Overall, the ethical use of AI is a concern for humanity as a whole and needs to be addressed at all levels. At the chatbot app level, we do the best we can.
In a rapidly evolving field like AI, how can ChatOn ensure it stays ahead of market trends and competitor developments?
I don’t think there is a universal recipe for always staying ahead of the market and your competitors. However, it’s important to understand which aspects are within the product team’s control and which aspects they can influence.
One of the best ways to stay ahead of the game is to listen to your users and dig deep into their needs, challenges, and aspirations. Thorough analysis of this data is essential. Addressing user issues directly isn’t always the best approach. In some cases, one problem may have an entirely different problem lurking beneath the surface, and solving it can make the product better for many users.
It is also important to keep an eye on developments in technology in general. Sometimes an opportunity presents itself to accomplish something previously thought impossible.
Of course, it’s important to monitor your competitors. This should not be done with the sole purpose of hastily copying its features, but rather to explore its innovative ideas, reflect on how and why they came about, test hypotheses, and should be done to select the one.
My approach is to plan my own path while always being aware of what’s going on around me. This approach requires a clear strategy to stay on course.
As an AI and product management expert, what emerging technologies and trends in AI are you most excited about, and how might they impact the future of apps like ChatOn?
First, it’s interesting to see the evolution of today’s LLM capabilities. After making significant progress, the “building strengths” phase begins. Both the amount of data and the number of parameters used to train the model will increase. This further improves the functionality of the model.
You’ll also be able to run these large-scale models on your phone, tablet, or laptop without having to be online. This advancement improves the security and convenience of user data while also reducing the cost of such services.
When it comes to ChatOn and other apps, advances in AI will allow us to address previously unsolvable user tasks. For example, you can now extract key ideas from a 100-page document in just 10 seconds. Over time, AI bots will evolve from just useful tools to digital personal assistants that understand you better than anyone else and can even complete sentences for you. This evolution will greatly simplify your life and allow you to focus on what is truly valuable and interesting to you.
Thank you for the wonderful interview. Readers interested in learning more can visit the AIBY Group or download the ChatOn app.
