Midjourney

Midjourney is a San Francisco research lab founded by David Holz, who had previously co-founded Leap Motion, a company that made hand-tracking sensors. Its product, also called Midjourney, is an image generator: you write a description, a prompt such as "an old lighthouse in a storm, oil painting", and within seconds you get several images that did not exist before.

Under the hood it uses a diffusion model, trained on a huge collection of images paired with their descriptions. It starts from random visual noise and removes it step by step, guided by your words, until a picture appears. Midjourney shows a grid of four options; you pick one to enlarge, ask for variations, or change the wording and try again.

It opened to the public in 2022, at first only through Discord, a chat app, where you typed commands such as /imagine in shared channels; a web app came later. It is paid by subscription, and the company is known for being small and funded by its own revenue rather than by big investors. It also sits at the center of the debate about AI and art: an image made with it won a fine arts competition at the Colorado State Fair in 2022, and it has been sued by artists and by film studios who argue it was trained on their work without permission.