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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Meta is partnering with AI start-up Midjourney.
- It’s the latest move in Meta’s rapid transformation to keep up in the AI race.
- Midjourney will remain independent, according to its CEO.
Meta is partnering with Midjourney as part of its ongoing effort to win the AI race.
The collaboration will allow Meta to integrate Midjourney’s “aesthetic technology” into future models and products, Meta Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang wrote in a X post on Friday. “We are incredibly impressed by Midjourney,” Wang wrote. “They have accomplished true feats of technical and aesthetic excellence, and we are thrilled to be working more closely with them.”
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Midjourney launched in the summer of 2022, not long before generative AI began to spread like wildfire across the cultural landscape, thanks in large part to the release of ChatGPT about four months later. The company quickly became known as an industry leader in text-to-image models; it released an image-to-video model, called V1, in June of this year.
The financial terms of the Meta-Midjourney partnership have not been made public. “We remain an independent, community-backed research lab, with no investors,” Midjourney CEO David Holz wrote on X on Friday.
Meta’s pivot toward AI
The news arrives during a moment of rapid transformation within Meta, as the company scrambles to establish itself as an industry leader in AI.
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The company launched a superintelligence division in June, reportedly incentivizing AI researchers from leading AI companies like OpenAI to break ranks and join Meta with nine-figure compensation packages (Meta successfully poached Apple’s top AI executive). The move sharply escalated a talent war across Silicon Valley — at the same time, incidentally, that many younger and less experienced computer scientists are struggling to gain a foothold in the industry.
The launch of Meta’s Superintelligence lab coincided with a multibillion-dollar investment in Scale AI, a company that helps tech companies train AI models. Wang, the cofounder and former CEO of Scale, was brought aboard to lead the superintelligence project.
What happens next?
It’s unclear at this point exactly how partnering with Midjourney will affect the evolution of Meta’s AI products. But Meta’s AI strategy to date offers a couple of clues.
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The company could, for example, fold Midjourney’s image- and video-generating tools into an AI product package for advertisers, who still form Meta’s financial backbone. The company reportedly has plans to automate every step of the ad-production process, and the collaboration could become an integral part of making that vision a reality.
The partnership could also help Meta build more realistic and engaging AI companions — which CEO Mark Zuckerberg has hinted will be a key part of his vision for the future — across its family of apps, which includes Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Meta could also integrate Midjourney with its Meta AI app, which combines a multimodal chatbot with a social media community element.
Meta and Midjourney did not immediately respond to ZDNET’s request for comment.