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Following success in the artificial intelligence (AI) image-generating landscape, Midjourney is ready to expand into hardware, according to a Thursday announcement posted on its official X account.
“We’re officially getting into hardware. If you’re interested in joining the new team in San Francisco, please email us at [email protected],” the California-based AI giant wrote, opening applications to job seekers and confirming allegations that have been going on for a while.
Clues, expectations, and trolls
In a series of mysterious responses on X, Midjourney offered several clues about its new hardware division.
The first tease came with the confirmation of the division’s head, Ahmad Abbas, who was already hired by the company earlier in February. Abbas currently has the “Head of Hardware” at Midjourney listed on his LinkedIn account after his career at Apple as the former engineering manager for the Vision Pro headset.
He also already has experience working with Midjourney’s Chief Executive David Holz at Leap Motion, which developed motion-tracking peripherals.
Additionally, Midjourney clarified that its hardware device would not be a wearable, similar to Friend’s AI pendant, but something that would let users go “inside of”. This makes sense since the company’s text-to-image technology cannot fit in AI pendants due to limited screens and interfaces.
That said, Midjourney’s hardware can be expected to be the first of its kind, especially since it stated that there were “definitely opportunities for new form factors.” One X user also dug up an old post from Holz, saying that “we will make an orb” with a spherical form factor inspired by memes about wizard’s spheres from fantasy stories.
While some of these replies should not be taken too seriously, Midjourney told TechCrunch writer Kyle Wiggers that it has “multiple efforts in flight” as it tries to figure out how to excel in the AI-driven hardware industry.
Getting into hardware amid AI tensions
Midjourney’s expansion to hardware came amid growing rivalry in the AI landscape. Recently, FLUX.1 and Grok 2 joined the AI image-generation space, along with other photorealistic technologies, but the company has already answered with an update, including a unified AI image editor on its website and enhanced communication between its web and Discord communities.
However, Midjourney is also facing a class-action lawsuit against a group of artists over copyright infringement. Nevertheless, despite the legal battles, it remains steadfast in developing its AI models for video and 3D generation—and, now, for hardware, too.
