Midjourney, one of many earliest AI image-generating providers on the net, has launched its first new AI picture mannequin in practically a yr.
Dubbed V7, the mannequin, which started rolling out in alpha round midnight Japanese on Friday, comes per week after OpenAI debuted a brand new picture generator in ChatGPT that shortly went viral for its means to create Ghibli-style photographs. Midjourney’s shouldn’t be a Ghibli-optimized mannequin — not less than not formally — however nonetheless generates aesthetically pleasing works, not less than to this reporter’s dilettante eye.
To make use of it, you’ll first should charge round 200 photos 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 to have personalization switched on by default.
When you’ve accomplished that activity, you’ll be greeted with a togglable V7 on Midjourney’s web site and, if you happen to’re a member of Midjourney’s Discord server, on its Discord chatbot. Within the internet 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 post on X.
“V7 is […] a lot smarter with textual content prompts,” Holz continued in an announcement on Discord. “[I]mage prompts look unbelievable, picture high quality is noticeably larger with stunning textures, and our bodies, arms, and objects of all types have considerably higher coherence on all particulars.”
V7 is obtainable in two flavors, Turbo and Chill out — the previous of which is extra expensive to run — and powers a brand new instrument known as Draft Mode that renders photos at 10x the velocity and half the price of the usual mode. Draft photos are lower-quality than standard-mode photos, however may 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 is our smartest, most stunning, 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
A variety of Midjourney capabilities aren’t accessible but for V7, in response to 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 wholly new mannequin with distinctive strengths and possibly a number of weaknesses” Holz wrote on Discord. “[W]e need to be taught from you what it’s good and unhealthy at, however positively consider it could require totally different kinds of prompting. So mess around a bit.”
In my transient testing, V7 adhered fairly properly to the prompts I gave it. Granted, I didn’t have time to actually put the mannequin by means of 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 out of doors cash.
In late 2023, Midjourney was reportedly anticipating to herald round $200 million in income. Lately, the San Francisco-based agency mentioned that it was establishing a {hardware} group to work on undisclosed initiatives, and it continues to coach beforehand introduced fashions for video and 3D object technology.
Several lawsuits accuse Midjourney of infringing on the rights of thousands and thousands of artists by coaching AI instruments on photos scraped from the net with out the consent of the pictures’ creators.