Whatever Midjourney fields, it is likely to be something unlike anything we’ve seen in the recent hardware space.
Midjourney, the popular AI image generation service and company, today formally confirmed what had been rumored and suspected for a while: it’s getting into hardware devices.
The company announced the move in a post from its official account on X, stating, “We’re officially getting into hardware. If you’re interested in joining the new team in San Francisco please email us at hardware@midjourney.com”
Disclaimer: VentureBeat uses Midjourney and other AI image generators to create article illustrations and other collateral.Scarce information and many cryptic clues about Midjourney’s hardware ambitions
Midjourney’s official X account and that of its founder and leader David Holz, a former co-founder and CTO of the gestural hand-tracking startup Leap Motion, offered a few more clues about what Midjourney has in mind for its hardware team.
The company appeared to confirm earlier observations that it has hired Ahmad Abbas, the former Hardware Engineering Manager of Apple’s Vision Pro “spatial computing” headset and a former colleague of Holz’s at Leap Motion, to lead its hardware division. Abbas has “Head of Hardware” at Midjourney listed on his LinkedIn with a start date of December 2023.
Abbas himself announced his decision to join Midjourney in a LinkedIn post 7 months ago.
The Midjourney company account confirmed the device would “not” be “a pendant,” which has been the form of some early AI devices so far. That makes sense, given that Midjourney’s current product is centered on using diffusion-based AI models to generate still imagery on the fly, and pendants typically don’t ship with screens or large enough interfaces to see imagery in much detail.
