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Earlier this month, AI image-generation platform Midjourney announced new and improved features with the Midjourney 6.1 version. Last week, they announced free trials on its web browser in a probable bid to attract new customers, which even saw a significant shift in user engagement from their Discord server. As if that wasn’t enough, the company made a surprising announcement of its plan to enter the hardware market.
Source: X
Surprising? Not Really
While this might be an official announcement, Midjourney had been working on the hardware division for sometime now.
Earlier this year, people observed that the former hardware engineering manager for Apple’s Vision Pro spatial computing headset, Ahmad Abbas, was appointed as the head of hardware at Midjourney in December last year. Abbas had also previously worked with Elon Musk’s Neuralink in the hardware design team.
Interestingly, Abbas was also a former colleague of the founder of Midjourney, David Holz, at his venture Leap Motion.
Looking back at Holz’s career trajectory, the Midjourney founder had essentially been on the hardware side. His last company, Leap Motion, which is now Ultraleap, was into mid-air haptics and 3D hand tracking. In 2018, the company even announced an open-source AR Dev Kit titled Project North Star.
This is particularly relevant in fields like AR/VR, where the integration between what the user sees and how they interact with it needs to be flawless. Hardware tailored for Midjourney’s software could provide a competitive edge in user experience.
With the founder and head of hardware coming from an VR/spatial computing domain, speculation and discussions on Midjourney’s new hardware line was obviously on similar lines.
Diversification is the Route
A year ago, when text-to-image AI generation platforms were just emerging, Midjourney was almost like the reigning king. While the company continues to do well, remaining bootstrapped, and reportedly generating over $200 million in annual revenue through subscriptions, it continues to face stiff competition from multiple players.
Big tech companies such as OpenAI, Google, and now X, have all entered the AI image generation space, with products such as Imagen and Grok2. Furthermore, given how StabilityAI, the makers of Stable Diffusion, have been facing a management shift—with the latest development being the founder Emad Mostaque’s departure from the company, which was also reported to have failed at raising funds—it is only advisable that companies either diversify or find a moat.
Guesses Keep Coming
While there is no official confirmation on what the product will be, speculation has been rife all over X. From guessing AI pendants, (with people hoping, it’s not) to giant orbs, alluding to an old tweet of Holz, people have been making wild guesses. However, the company stuck to not clarifying. “We aren’t announcing anything specific yet, but we have multiple efforts in flight,” said their X post.
Source: X
When Midjourney posted the above question to a user, the discussions that led thereafter transcended into the possibility of an AI immersive art-kind of experience. A user even speculates if it would be a TeamLab kind of concept, where artworks move and interact with each other in a museum.
Considering how AI art is an emerging trend and how Midjourney has powered a lot of these artists, it would be interesting if the company would be able to design something that would help them advance on the hardware and software side.
It is also interesting to note that Midjourney opened up personality surveys to people in order to ‘understand the structure of personality and its relationship to perceptions of beauty.’ While there may not be much to connect here, it certainly seems that the company is generating a highly customised product.
