That's mostly because they make a finished end-user product, which nobody else does (except OpenAI and DALL-E, but they are mostly focused on language processin

That's mostly because they make a finished end-user product, which nobody else does (except OpenAI and DALL-E, but they are mostly focused on language processing right now). - It runs in the cloud with more VRAM available than on consumer machines, so it's able to use more parameters and custom layers. This makes it more coherent. - It's finetuned on a large RLHF dataset, which they have from the users voting for bot-generated images in their massively popular Discord server. - It includes a decent share of custom processing and manual tuning (system prompts, custom layers trained on god knows what etc) Their closest contender, Stability AI, is currently busy training SDXL, their new model, on a RLHF dataset they are collecting on their much smaller Discord channel. So Midjourney is SOTA for text-to-image. There's DeepFloyd IF which is large enough and includes a 11B LLM for natural language understanding, so it has much less issues understanding complex prompts such as "koi fish doing a handstand on a longboard rolling down the slope of a moon crater". But it's not a finished product (no complex pipelines, no RLHF), and the license is restrictive. That said, Midjourney's strengths are also its weaknesses. Midjourney is good for the text-to-image, but not much else, and image generation is much more than just text-to-image. MJ gives great results off the bat, but struggles with unusual requests, complex compositions with multiple objects, and can't use various elaborate trickery available in the much smaller Stable Diffusion (which is mediocre by default but has powerful higher-order guidance and training, and is also much better at complex things). Midjourney is also censored - you can't have Joe Biden eating a slice of porcupine.