Midjourney releases its first new AI picture mannequin in practically a yr

Midjourney, one of many earliest AI image-generating companies on the internet, has launched its first new AI picture mannequin in practically a yr.

Dubbed V7, the mannequin, which started rolling out in alpha round midnight Jap on Friday, comes every week after OpenAI debuted a brand new picture generator in ChatGPT that quickly went viral for its capability to create Ghibli-style images. Midjourney’s is just not a Ghibli-optimized mannequin — at the very least not formally — however nonetheless generates aesthetically pleasing works, at the very least to this reporter’s dilettante eye.

To make use of it, you’ll first must price round 200 pictures to construct a Midjourney “personalization” profile in the event 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, in the event you’re a member of Midjourney’s Discord server, on its Discord chatbot. Within the internet app, you possibly can 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 post 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 stunning textures, and our bodies, arms, and objects of all types have considerably higher coherence on all particulars.”

V7 is out there in two flavors, Turbo and Calm down — the previous of which is extra pricey to run — and powers a brand new software known as Draft Mode that renders pictures at 10x the pace and half the price of the usual mode. Draft pictures are lower-quality than standard-mode pictures, however will 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 subsequent two months. pic.twitter.com/Ogqt0fgiY7

— Midjourney (@midjourney) April 4, 2025

Quite a lot of Midjourney capabilities aren’t obtainable but for V7, in accordance 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 doubtless a number of weaknesses” Holz wrote on Discord. “[W]e need to study from you what it’s good and dangerous at, however undoubtedly take note it might require totally different kinds of prompting. So mess around a bit.”

In my transient testing, V7 adhered fairly effectively to the prompts I gave it. Granted, I didn’t have time to actually put the mannequin by way 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 usher in round $200 million in income. Lately, the San Francisco-based agency mentioned that it was establishing a hardware team to work on undisclosed initiatives, and it continues to coach beforehand introduced fashions for video and 3D object era.

Several lawsuits accuse Midjourney of infringing on the rights of tens of millions of artists by coaching AI instruments on pictures scraped from the net with out the consent of the photographs’ creators.