Midjourney, one of many first AI-based picture turbines on the net, has launched its first new AI picture mannequin in practically a 12 months.
Dubbed V7, the mannequin started rolling out in alpha round midnight EST on Thursday, comes per week after OpenAI debuted a brand new picture generator in ChatGPT that shortly went viral for its capability to create Ghibli-style pictures.
Midjourney’s is just not a Ghibli-optimized mannequin, although — no less than not formally — but it surely nonetheless can generate aesthetically pleasing works, no less than to this reporter’s dilettante eye.
We’re now starting the alpha-test section of our new V7 picture Mannequin. It’s our smartest, most lovely, most coherent mannequin but. Give it a shot and count on updates each week or two for the following two months. pic.twitter.com/Ogqt0fgiY7
— Midjourney (@midjourney) April 4, 2025
To make use of it, you’ll first must charge round 200 pictures to construct a Midjourney “personalization” profile, if you happen to haven’t already. This profile tunes the mannequin to your particular person visible preferences; V7 is Midjourney’s first mannequin to have personalization switched on by default.
When you’ve finished that, you’ll have the ability to flip V7 on or off on Midjourney’s web site and, if you happen to’re a member of Midjourney’s Discord server, on its Discord chatbot. Within the net app, you may shortly 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 increased with lovely textures, and our bodies, fingers, and objects of every kind have considerably higher coherence on all particulars.”
V7 is out there in two flavors, Turbo (costlier to run) and Chill out, and powers a brand new software known as Draft Mode that renders pictures at 10x the velocity and half the price of the usual mode. Draft pictures are of decrease high quality than standard-mode pictures, however they are often enhanced and re-rendered with a click on.
Quite a few commonplace Midjourney options aren’t obtainable but for V7, in response to Holz, together with picture upscaling and retexturing. These will arrive within the close to future, he mentioned, presumably inside two months.
“That is a wholly new mannequin with distinctive strengths and doubtless a couple of weaknesses” Holz wrote on Discord. “[W]e wish to be taught from you what it’s good and dangerous at, however positively have in mind it could require totally different types of prompting. So mess around a bit.”
In my transient testing, V7 adhered fairly properly to my prompts, although 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 raised a dime of outdoor cash.
In late 2023, Midjourney was reportedly anticipating to usher in round $200 million in income. Lately, the San Francisco-based agency mentioned it was establishing a {hardware} crew to work on some tasks that it didn’t element, and it continues to coach beforehand introduced fashions for video and 3D object era.
The corporate is going through a number of lawsuits that accuse it of infringing on the rights of thousands and thousands of artists by coaching AI instruments on pictures scraped from the online with out the consent of the pictures’ creators.
