Midjourney, one of many earliest AI image-generating providers on the net, has launched its first new AI picture mannequin in almost a 12 months.
Dubbed V7, the mannequin, which started rolling out in alpha round midnight Jap on Thursday, comes per week after OpenAI debuted a brand new picture generator in ChatGPT that rapidly went viral for its means to create Ghibli-style photographs. Midjourney’s is just not a Ghibli-optimized mannequin — at the least not formally — however nonetheless generates aesthetically pleasing works, at the least to this reporter’s dilettante eye.
To make use of it, you’ll first should fee round 200 photographs to construct a Midjourney “personalization” profile when you haven’t already. This profile tunes the mannequin to your particular person visible preferences; V7 is Midjourney’s first to have personalization switched on by default.
When you’ve accomplished that job, you’ll be greeted with a togglable V7 on Midjourney’s web site and, when you’re a member of Midjourney’s Discord server, on its Discord chatbot. Within the internet app, you’ll be able to rapidly choose the mannequin from the drop-down menu subsequent to the “model” label.
Midjourney CEO David Holz described V7 as a “completely totally different structure” in a publish on X.
“V7 is (…) a lot smarter with textual content prompts,” Holz continued in an announcement on Discord. “(I)mage prompts look implausible, picture high quality is noticeably greater with lovely textures, and our bodies, fingers, and objects of all types have considerably higher coherence on all particulars.”
V7 is accessible in two flavors, Turbo and Calm down — the previous of which is extra expensive to run — and powers a brand new device known as Draft Mode that renders photographs at 10x the velocity and half the price of the usual mode. Draft photographs are lower-quality than standard-mode photographs, however could be enhanced and re-rendered with a click on of the mouse.
We’re now starting the alpha-test part of our new V7 picture Mannequin. It’s our smartest, most lovely, most coherent mannequin but. Give it a shot and anticipate updates each week or two for the following two months. pic.twitter.com/Ogqt0fgiY7
— Midjourney (@midjourney) April 4, 2025
A lot of Midjourney capabilities aren’t out there but for V7, in keeping with Holz, together with picture upscaling and retexturing. These will arrive within the close to future, he mentioned — probably as quickly as inside two months.
“That is a completely new mannequin with distinctive strengths and possibly a couple of weaknesses” Holz wrote on Discord. “(W)e wish to study from you what it’s good and unhealthy at, however undoubtedly have in mind it might require totally different types of prompting. So mess around a bit.”
In my transient testing, V7 adhered fairly nicely to the prompts I gave it. Granted, I didn’t have time to actually put the mannequin by the ringer.
Midjourney is an uncommon operation. Began in 2022 by Holz, who co-founded PC peripheral firm Leap Movement, it hasn’t taken a dime of outdoor cash.
In late 2023, Midjourney was reportedly anticipating to usher in round $200 million in income. Just lately, the San Francisco-based agency mentioned that it was establishing a {hardware} workforce to work on undisclosed initiatives, and it continues to coach beforehand introduced fashions for video and 3D object era.
A number of lawsuits accuse Midjourney of infringing on the rights of thousands and thousands of artists by coaching AI instruments on photographs scraped from the online with out the consent of the photographs’ creators.
