What ever happend to midjourney?

Lalabadie 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

No external funding raised. They're not on the VC path, so no need to chase insane growth. They still have around 500M USD in ARR.

In my (very personal) opinion, they're part of a very small group of organizations that sell inference under a sane and successful business model.

	▲	aenvoker an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Not on the VC path. Not even on the max-profit path. Just on the "Have fun doing cool research" path. I was a mod on MJ for its first few years and got to know MJ's founder through discussions there. He already had "enough" money for himself from his prior sale of Leap Motion to do whatever he wanted. And, he decided what he wanted was to do cool research with fun people. So, he started MJ. Now he has far more money than before and what he wants to do with it is to have more fun doing more cool research.
	▲	spaceman_2020 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Aesthetically, still unmatched

▲

wongarsu 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They have image and video models that are nowhere near SOTA on prompt adherence or image editing but pretty good on the artistic side. They lean in on features like reference images so objects or characters have a consistent look, biasing the model towards your style preferences, or using moodboards to generate a consistent style

▲

vunderba 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A lot of people started realizing that it didn’t really matter how pretty the resulting image was if it completely failed to adhere to the prompt.

Even something like Flux.1 Dev which can be run entirely locally and was released back in August of 2024 has significantly better prompt understanding.

▲

raincole 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Not much, while everything happened at OpenAI/Google/Chinese companies. And that's the problem.

▲

KeplerBoy 8 hours ago | parent [-]

How is it a problem? There simply doesn't seem to be a moat or secret sauce. Who cares which of these models is SOTA? In two months there will be a new model.

▲

waldarbeiter 8 hours ago | parent [-]

There seems to be a moat like infrastructure/gpus and talent. The best models right now come from companies with considerable resources/funding.

▲

esperent 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Right, but that's a short term moat. If they pause on their incredible levels of spending for even 6 months, someone else will take over having spent only a tiny fraction of what they did. They might get taken over anyway.

▲

raincole 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> someone else will take over having spent only a tiny fraction of what they did

How. By magic? You fell for 'Deepseek V3 is as good as SOTA'?

	▲	Gud 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		By reverse engineering, sheer stupidity from the competition, corporate espionage, ‘stealing’ engineers and sometimes a stroke of genius, the same as it’s always been

▲

qingcharles 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

They still have a niche. Their style references feature is their key differentiator now, but I find I can usually just drop some images of a MJ style into Gemini and get it to give me a text prompt that works just as well as MJ srefs.