Midjourney is a generative artificial intelligence program and service created and hosted by San Francisco–based independent research lab Midjourney, Inc. Midjourney generates images from natural language descriptions, called prompts, similar to OpenAI’s DALL-E and Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion. It is one of the technologies of the AI Spring.
The tool is currently in open beta, which it entered on July 12, 2022. The Midjourney team is led by David Holz, who co-founded Leap Motion. Holz told The Register in August 2022 that the company was already profitable. Users create artwork with Midjourney using Discord bot commands.
Model versions
The company has been working on improving its algorithms, releasing new model versions every few months. Version 2 of their algorithm was launched in April 2022 and version 3 on July 25. On November 5, 2022, the alpha iteration of version 4 was released to users. On March 15, 2023, the alpha iteration of version 5 was released. The 5.1 model is more opinionated than version 5, applying more of its own stylization to images, while the 5.1 RAW model adds improvement while working better with more literal prompts. After version 5.2 is released with a increasingly better image quality. On December 21, 2023, the alpha iteration of version 6 was released. The model was trained from scratch over a nine month period. Support was added for better text rendition and a more literal interpretation of prompts.