Midjourney Expands into Hardware Development, Shaking Up AI Industry

AI image generator Midjourney is venturing into hardware development - SiliconANGLE

AI image generator Midjourney is venturing into hardware development Artificial intelligence image generation company Midjourney Inc. announced today on X Inc. that it was getting into hardware and that it was looking to add new members to its team to assist in the endeavor. Exactly what hardware Midjourney is planning on building is not clear - AI image generation companies aren't normally prone to venture into hardware construction, but that said, the market itself is still relatively young so the question arises - why not? VentureBeat reports that some clues about what Midjorney might be considering building can be found among its existing talent. Midjourney's founder and head, David Holz, was previously a co-founder of and chief technology office at Leap Motion. Leap Motion was an early, well-funded startup in the virtual and augmented reality space that, despite grand ambitions and even a rumored acquisition offer from Apple Inc., ran out of money and sold in a fire sale for $30 million in 2019. Later incarnations of Leap Motion - now known as Ultraleep, tried focusing on commercial offerings but found only limited success. Also hired by Midjourney in December as "Head of Hardware" was Ahmand Abbas, who, along with previously working at Leap Motion, spent five years at Apple working on the Apple Vision Pro. With the backgrounds of both Holz and Abbas, the possible hardware device could very well be something in the AR and VR space, although it's an odd tangent given that Midjourney is an AI imaging-making company. The company has previously said that it was moving into 3D, video and real-time generation models and there's possibly some potential for crossover there - a generative AI video model could be leveraged to generate VR experiences, for example. Whatever is planned, Midjourney is having some fun teasing what it might be. In response to various comments on X, Midjourney said it is not going to be a pendant, and when asked if it will be wearable, the response was, "Is it wearable if you have to go inside of it?" In another reply on X, Midjourney wrote "We aren't announcing anything specific yet, but we have multiple efforts in flight," suggesting that the company could have multiple hardware projects in mind. Whatever they are planning on building, it will require money and Midjourney is a rare breed of startup - it's entirely bootstrapped and the company has never raised any venture capital funding. With a team of only 40 people, the company brought in an impressive $200 million in revenue in 2023, but building hardware is expensive - with the company now hiring and having ambitious plans, it wouldn't be surprising to see Midjourney seeking to raise VC funds in the coming months.

Midjourney announces hardware team and opens to applicants

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Midjourney, the popular AI image generation service and company, today formally confirmed what had been rumored and suspected for a while: it's getting into hardware devices. The company announced the move in a post from its official account on X, stating, "We're officially getting into hardware. If you're interested in joining the new team in San Francisco please email us at [email protected]" Disclaimer: VentureBeat uses Midjourney and other AI image generators to create article illustrations and other collateral. Scarce information and many cryptic clues about Midjourney's hardware ambitions Midjourney's official X account and that of its founder and leader David Holz, a former co-founder and CTO of the gestural hand-tracking startup Leap Motion, offered a few more clues about what Midjourney has in mind for its hardware team. The company appeared to confirm earlier observations that it has hired Ahmad Abbas, the former Hardware Engineering Manager of Apple's Vision Pro "spatial computing" headset and a former colleague of Holz's at Leap Motion, to lead its hardware division. Abbas has "Head of Hardware" at Midjourney listed on his LinkedIn with a start date of December 2023. The Midjourney company account confirmed the device would "not" be "a pendant," which has been the form of some early AI devices so far. That makes sense, given that Midjourney's current product is centered on using diffusion-based AI models to generate still imagery on the fly, and pendants typically don't ship with screens or large enough interfaces to see imagery in much detail. In another cryptic response on X, it alluded to a device you go "inside of" rather than being a wearable. The company told one TechCrunch writer (and former VentureBeat journalist) that it has "multiple efforts in flight." Holz posted a reply stating that remote hires would "probably" not be supported. Another X user dug up an old X post from Holz indicating that he was interested in pursuing an "orb" as a form factor, referencing the meme about pondering orbs. Whatever Midjourney fields, it is likely to be something unlike anything we've seen in the recent hardware space, as the official company account noted there was "definitely opportunities for new form factors." Facing increasing competition in the AI model space The news comes on the heels of Midjourney facing steeper competition than ever from new photorealistic AI image generation models and services, such as the new Flux.1-powered Grok 2 model fielded by Elon Musk's company xAI, and the new Ideogram 2, the latter of which can generate reliable text baked into images in all conceivable fonts and styles. Midjourney countered the rise of some of these competitors last week by updating its web interface to make it more unified, and opening it up to all users, including ones outside of its Discord server, with 25 free image generations to start. And if the company is worried about the ongoing class-action lawsuit by artists against it, accusing it of engaging in copyright infringement through its data scraping and labeling of prior publicly posted works on the web (without explicit permission), it's not showing it. AI hardware has been a tough nut to crack (so far...) With few details confirmed about the form factor, price, availability, and operations of Midjourney's planned hardware devices, it's difficult of course to even cast any sort of preemptive judgement or prediction about how the hardware will fare once users get their hands on it. However, we do know that the early forays by other startups into dedicated AI-powered devices have not gone well so far: both Rabbit and Humane are startups that have fielded differing versions of devices centered around AI -- the r1 and Ai Pin -- and neither has quite caught on with the mainstream. Humane, in fact, has been reportedly seeking a buyer and facing more returns than sales in recent months. Another would-be AI-focused hardware startup, Friend, which offers a pendant of the same name, was mocked widely online after it was revealed its founder spent most of the capital raised so far on securing the valuable domain name. Even more established startups that emerged prior to the generative AI boom such as Meta and Snapchat have had a tough time convincing consumers -- who already have smartphones and laptops -- to shell out for dedicated, innovative hardware such as augmented reality glasses. Regardless, with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reportedly working with former legendary Apple designer Jony Ive on new AI hardware, the AI hardware space is clearly about to get more interesting than ever.

Midjourney says it's 'getting into hardware' | TechCrunch

Midjourney, the AI image-generating platform that's reportedly raking in more than $200 million in revenue without a single dime of VC investment, is officially getting into hardware. The company made the announcement in a post on X on Wednesday. Midjourney's new hardware team will be based in San Francisco, it revealed. Exactly what sort of hardware might two-year-old Midjourney, which has a team of fewer than 100 people, pursue? Well, there might be a clue in Midjourney's hiring of Ahmad Abbas early in February. For more than five years, Abbas -- an ex-Neuralink staffer -- helped develop the Apple Vision Pro, Apple's mixed reality headset, most recently as hardware engineering manager. Midjourney CEO David Holz is no stranger to hardware himself. He co-founded Leap Motion, which built motion tracking peripherals. (Abbas worked together with Holz at Leap, in fact.) Despite the lawsuits over its AI training approach working their way through the courts, Midjourney has said it's continuing to develop AI models for video and 3D generation. The hardware could perhaps be related to those efforts, as well.

AI image-generation company Midjourney says it's "getting into hardware"

It hired a hardware chief who previously worked on Apple Vision Pro. Midjourney, a company best known for its robust AI image-generation tool, has publicly announced that it's "getting into hardware" and has invited job-seekers to apply to join its new hardware division. The company shared the announcement on its official X account earlier today. Midjourney founder David Holz previously worked at a hardware company; he was CTO of Leap Motion. A few months ago, he hired Ahmad Abbas, with whom he worked at Leap Motion. Abbas also worked at Apple for five years as a hardware manager working on the Vision Pro headset. His LinkedIn profile now lists his current title as "Head of Hardware, Midjourney." Further ReadingNothing is yet known about what kind of device Midjourney will develop, but that X account has posted numerous tweets today that could give Internet sleuths insight into exactly what its plans are. For example, it posted that the device is "not gonna be a pendant" in the wake of a rash of multiple recent failed pendant-like AI hardware devices. The company tweeted that it has "multiple efforts in flight" when asked for more details about the device, and noted that there are "definitely opportunities for more form factors." If you really want to stretch, you can look back to the fact that Holz months ago tweeted "we will make the orb" in response to a fellow X user joking that someone ought to make a device with a spherical form factor inspired by wizards' spheres from fantasy stories, like Saruman's palantír from The Lord of the Rings. In case it's not obvious, both Midjourney and Holz have been prolific on X with teases and trolls about it to the point that you probably shouldn't read too much into anything they've said, beyond the commitment to produce some kind of hardware. There's no timeline, either, so it might be a while before we see what happens. At this point, Midjourney is just one of many companies trying to figure out what AI-driven hardware will look like.