MidJourney's Strategic Revival with Meta

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1:26a little bit tricky to use it because at first it used to be on Discord. I think they do have a website now, but at first it was kind of buried in Discord. They don't have an API, so developers aren't really able to put it into other software. So it's been a little bit tricky to get the distribution, but it seems like they're sort of making a change, except they're not letting every developer use it. They're just letting Meta use it. So they have now made a partner with Meta, which is going to be really interesting. I'd love to hear your take on it, Jamie, but before we do, I wanted to mention, if you want to try out and learn about a lot of the AI models that we talk about on this show, I'd love for you to check out our AI hustle school community.

2:03So every single week, Jamie and I, we do a tutorial or a deep dive on basically how we're using AI tools to grow and scale our businesses. We have over 300 members in our school community. It is$20 a month. And so we just raised the price. It's going to be raised next week as well. And basically every week for the next four weeks, the price will be raised. So if you're interested in getting in, you can lock in$20 a month and it won't be raised on you. But it is basically a whole bunch of bonus content that you're not going to get anywhere else. And we explain how we're growing and scaling our businesses, all the insider secrets and tips that we don't publish anywhere else, exactly how we're doing things.

2:39So if you want to get a peek behind the curtain and basically see how to use those tools, this would be an amazing community. I'll leave a link in the description. We would love to have you as a member. All right, Jamie, let me know your thoughts on basically this partnership between meta and mid journey. Yeah. I mean, I think this is really cool. Uh, if you are not familiar with mid journey, which some people may actually have never heard of it because they kind of did, they fell off a little bit, honestly, they were one of the first, uh, the best first tools for AI video or AI photo generation.

3:08And it was used a lot by digital artists and people because you could really get a nail down a style, you know, with your prompting and just, it came up with some really beautiful, you know, imagery and stuff. And so, you know, they were one of the first, but like Jaden has already said, it was kind of a difficult tool to use. And so I think once OpenAI, you know, released their image generation tool that was maybe close to being as good, but it was already integrated with ChatGPT, you know, I just kind of, it was a lot easier for people to use those and go to those tools, which I think kind of made MidJourney fall off the radar a little bit, but still a great company.

3:46And I think Meta is realizing that if they are, since they're a social media company, they need to have their media, if it's going to be AI generated, be on point and they need to have a top level product. So, you know, they're so far from what I've experienced for some of their image generation stuff has been, you know, kind of, you know, not subpar, but like just, okay, not amazing. And so this really, I'm thinking this partnership really kind of take them to the next level. So I think it's a smart play. Jane, what do you think? Yeah. Well, a couple of things. The first thing I think is interesting is that Alexander Wang, he is kind of leading things over AI meta.

4:24And he made the announcement over on Threads, which I think is fun because I well, I think he posted on X. I actually saw it on X first, but I just think it's funny that it's also been posted here. And this is where like a lot of news articles are linking to. So anyways, he basically said today we're proud to announce partnership with MidJourney to license their aesthetic technology for our future models and products, bringing beauty to billions. Okay, bringing Beauty to Billions basically makes it seem like this is going to be Meta's main image generator. And the reason why I think this is interesting is because, like you mentioned, Jamie, Meta already has their own image generator that they rolled out a year ago, basically.

4:59But they did it last year, and it's called Imagine. And so you could be like, Meta, imagine me as a king or whatever. And then anyways, it's got these images. And I remember when it first came out, I thought, oh, it's fun. it would do this the thing where you like upload a bunch of pictures of yourself and it kind of clone you and and do your images it wasn't perfect it wasn't amazing it was okay um and i think as time goes on like image models have gotten a lot better and so it feels left behind i think zuckerberg specifically feels like meta is getting surpassed by a lot of technology and at this point it feels like he doesn't even care whose technology he's using as long as like meta itself isn't left behind and people aren't like oh yeah meta's like ai technology is bad so i think that's kind of interesting that they would go and like, it seems like roll this out as the image model inside of meta, right?

5:46Bringing it to billions. He said this technical collaboration between our research team is part of our effort to team up with the best companies in the industry whose work and expertise compliments our own. We're incredibly impressed with Midjourney. They have accomplished true feats of technical aesthetic excellence, and we're thrilled to be working more closely with them. Like it's true. Midjourney has a really amazing product. And the hardest part for them, honestly, has been distribution. I mean, mostly not having an API when every other AI company puts out an API and then all of a sudden gets incredible reach.

6:13So it seems like instead of an API, they just went direct to like one of the big behemoths with the most money and made a partnership. I think maybe that would be, maybe that will turn out to be a valuable or like a very profitable business strategy. I haven't seen anyone else really do this. It says to ensure Meta is able to deliver the best possible products for people. It'll require taking an all of the above approach this means world-class talent ambition compute roadmap and working with the best players across the industry we look forward to showing you what we build together more to come soon okay basically i think this is interesting because um they're just trying to grab at like everything they can they're like our image model's slow okay let's find the best one let's make a partnership let's pay for it like they're just kind of like reaching out in every direction and i mean i think it's gonna be a good strategy like i think it's gonna win i mean basically you're going to have the best you don't get this anywhere else except for if you sign up for um you know mid-journey and meta is obviously gonna offer this for free so you will get the best image model on meta's tools i may download the meta app and start using you know meta.ai or whatever it is to like generate thumbnails or things if it's actually uh using mid-journey and it's the best image model so honestly i think this is kind of a cool move by them yeah i'm really wondering what uh mark zuckerberg's long long game is with all this i think um i don't know i my mind goes back to his vr uh project oculus that kind of like he was saying was going to be the future and then people kind of made fun of the graphics you know and stuff within it um you know i just remember lots of memes going around but i kind of feel like long term maybe that's still his vision i don't know i also heard they're coming out with they're going to be coming out with the new type of ai glasses that also have a watch that pairs with it.

7:55Have you heard about this? It was like a leaked. Oh no, I did not see that. Yeah. Supposedly, Meta is going to be in the next month or two releasing a new product that's like your, you know, your Meta Ray-Bans, but it actually has a heads up display in it. And then also a watch that pairs with it. So it was some kind of inside leak from Meta. All that to say, I wonder if, you know, Mark is still holding on to the the integrated world like the VR world combined with ours like yeah you know kind of like the Apple Vision Pro thing maybe I don't know what are your thoughts Jaden yeah I think I think meta is trying to fire on all cylinders and I think that they're willing to do things that others won't to get the job done pay insane salaries to some AI researchers to get them on their team like they're basically willing to pull out all the stops and because they're backed by meta and they have such a huge war chest i think they're going to be able to successfully create some really incredible products like you're mentioning um and yeah i think this is going to be pretty interesting one thing that i will say is in regards to open ai a lot or in regards to mid journey a lot of people ask like what is the status of mid journey did they like get acquired because we also saw meta acquire play ai so it's like meta was kind of falling behind so instead they just like to leapfrog they buy play ai now they're gonna have world-class audio they're like making this partnership with mid journey their images are going to be like dialed in uh i'm sure they can figure out the llms i mean elon did it pretty fast with grok so it would be pretty like yeah i'm curious to see what's happening there but um this is what the the ceo of mid journey said about basically the partnership they're doing um so he's kind of replying to the thread on x that of alexander making the announcement david said david uh schultz is their is their ceo but he said bringing sublime tools of creation and beauty to billions of people is squarely within our mission excited to partner with the titans of industry to make this happen we remain an independent community-backed research lab with no investors working on a staggering array of ambitious projects focused on bringing about human futures where we're all mid where we are all mid journey join us all right we're all mid journey that that includes you anyways i think this is interesting basically is just like trying to reassure people that they didn't get bought out they have no investors and this is really impressive for mid journey so it seems like this is just kind of like a financial partnership where meta is going to probably be playing them licensing and it's going to be people are going to be able to run and generate images and so i think if that's the case this is going to be a huge windfall for mid journey it's going to be uh yeah it's going to be pretty impressive to see what they're able to to do with that kind of funding totally um hey if you enjoyed this episode be sure to leave us a rating and review wherever you're listening I really appreciate those and help us reach more people.

10:42And also be sure to check out the AI Hustle School community if you really want to learn how to grow your business with AI or make money on the side with AI. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time. And before we see you next time, if you didn't close out the episode before that happened, you are one of the lucky people who gets this bonus tidbit of news that I am so, so excited for. So anyways, there's a few of you. Most of you kind of ended it with Jamie's thing there. So this is the bonus tidbit that I got from reading the Twitter comments on some of this stuff. Not very many people know this.

11:14And by not many people, I think 10 people like this. 800 people in the world saw this. But you are going to know this incredible piece of information, which the CEO, someone said, is this just the API you were talking about? Or is MidJourney now a kind of external meta imaging lab, right? They're worried about basically if it was getting swiped up by meta. And he said, we've been publicly talking about working on both partnerships and APIs for the past month or two. this is more of the first than the second but lots of stuff coming imo meta will obviously do a lot of their own cool research related to imaging and then you mentioned something other okay guys this is the exciting thing for the last two months uh he's been whispering about doing an api so if this is the case i am absolutely ecstatic i'll be adding it to um ai box and hundreds of thousands of people will be adding this to software so this could be the first step in a really exciting thing where i actually start seeing mid journey integrated into stuff all right there's your bonus tidbit if you listen to our outro have a good day and we'll catch you guys in the next episode