6 ms·

Midjourney is the most popular discord channel by far with 19.5M+ members, $200M in revenue in 2023 with 0 external investments and only 40 employees. The prob

Midjourney is the most popular discord channel by far with 19.5M+ members, $200M in revenue in 2023 with 0 external investments and only 40 employees. The problem has nothing to do with commercializing image gen AI and all to do with Emad/Stability having seemingly 0 sensible business plans. Seriously this seemed to be the plan: Step 1: Release SD for free Step 2: ??? Step 3: Profit The vast majority of users couldn't be bothered to take the steps necessary to get it running locally so I don't even think the open sourcing philosophy would have been a serious hurdle to wider commercial adoption. In my opinion, a paid, easy to use, robust UI around Stability's models should have been the number one priority and they waited far too long to even begin. There's been a lot of amazing augmentations to the stable diffusion models (ControlNet, Dreambooth etc) that have propped up, lots of free research and implementations because the research community has latched onto the stability models and I feel they failed to capitalize on any of it.

epivosism 3y ago
Yes, and MJ has no public API either. Same for Ideogram, I imagine they have at least 10m in the bank, and aren't even bothering making an API despite being SoTA for lots of areas.
Satam 3y ago
There's money to be made for sure, and Stability's sloppy execution and strategy definitely didn't help them. But I think there are also industry-wide factors at play that make AI companies quite brittle for now.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
andrewljohnson 3y ago
I wonder if MidJourney is still ripping. I’m actually curious if it’s superior to ChatGPT’s Dall-E images… I switched and cancelled my subscription when ChatGPT added images, but I think I was mostly focused on convenience.
- famouswaffles 3y ago
  If you have a particular style in mind then results may vary but aesthetically Midjourney is generally still the best, however Dalle-3 has every other model beat in terms of prompt adherence.
- Legend2440 3y ago
  Image quality, stylistic variety, and resolution are much better than ChatGPT. Prompt following is a little better with ChatGPT, but MJ v6 has narrowed the gap.
teaearlgraycold 3y ago
> $200M in revenue in 2023 with 0 external investments and only 40 employees. The dream
- manquer 3y ago
  For a founder maybe , definitely not for employees . AI startups need not an insignificant amount of startup capital , you cannot just spend weekends to build like you would a saas app . Model training is expensive so only wealthy individuals can even consider this route Companies like that have no oversight or control mechanisms when management inevitably goes down crazy paths, also without external valuations option vesting structures are hard to ascertain value.
  - teaearlgraycold 3y ago
    As a counter-point, with no VCs there's more equity left for employees.
    - hsjsbeebue 3y ago
      If valued $2bn then even a 0.1% is $2m. Not bad.
      - teaearlgraycold 3y ago
        Early employees may have gotten 2-3% and are completely undiluted.
        hsjsbeebue 3y ago
        Yes indeed! Probably furiously vesting now!
    - khazhoux 3y ago
      As a counter-counter-point that gets rarely discussed on HN, VCs aren't taking as much of the pie as people think. In a 2-founder, 4-engineer company, it wouldn't be unusual to have equity be roughly: 20% investors 70% founders 2-3% employees (1% emp1, 1% emp2, 0.5% emp3, 0.25% emp4) 7% for future employees before next funding round
llm_trw 3y ago
>The vast majority of users couldn't be bothered to take the steps necessary to get it running locally so I don't even think the open sourcing philosophy would have been a serious hurdle to wider commercial adoption. The more I think about the AI space the more I realize that open sourcing large models is pointless now. Until you can reasonably buy a rig to run the model there is simply no point in doing this. It's no like you will be edified by setting the weights either. I think an ethical business model for these business is to release whatever model can fit into a $10,000 machine and keeping the rest closed source until above machine is able to run them.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  The released image generation models run on consumer GPUs. Even the big LLMs will run on a $3500 Mac with reasonable performance, and the CPU of a dirt cheap machine if you don't care about it being slow, which is sometimes important and sometimes isn't. Also, things like this are in the works: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39794864 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39794864 Which will put the system RAM of the new 24-channel PC servers in range of the Nvidia H100 on memory bandwidth, while using commodity DDR5.
  - llm_trw 3y ago
    The `big' AI models are trillion parameter models. The medium sized models like GPT3 and Grok are 185b and 314b respectively. There is no way for _anyone_ to run these on a sub $50k machine in 2024, and even if you can the token generation speed on CPU is under 0.1 tokens per second.
    - GaggiX 3y ago
      ChatGPT is 20B according to Microsoft researchers, also the fact that big AI models are trillion parameter models is mostly speculation, about GPT-4 it was spread by geohot.
      - speedgoose 3y ago
biztos 3y ago
Yes, and I'm grateful to them for sticking to that plan. :-) But for the individuals involved, it might also be Step 2: Leverage fame in AI space for massive VC injection on favorable terms.
blensor 3y ago
Are we sure that Midjourney is still on that trajectory? I was a heavy user since the beginning but my usage has dropped to almost 0
- jack_riminton 3y ago
  I think you're a sample size of one
  - blensor 3y ago
    I mean of course I am a sample size of one when I am speaking about my own experience? That's why I asked that question to see if others notice something similar or if that's just me
jonplackett 3y ago
Leonardo.ai have basically done exactly this and seem to be doing OK. It’s a shame because they’re literally just using stable diffusion for all their tech but built a nicer front end and incorporated control net. No-where else has done this. Controlnet / instantID etc are the really killer things about SD and make it way more powerful than Midjourney, but they aren’t even available via the stability API. They just don’t seem to care.
- mikehearn 3y ago
  InstantID uses a non-commercial licensed model (from insightface) as part of its pipeline so I think that makes it a no-go for being part of Stability's commercial service.
HlessClaudesman 3y ago
Heres a Stable Diffusion buisness idea: sign up all the celebrities and artists who are cool with AI, and provide end users / fans with an AI image generation interface, trained on their exclusive likenesses / artwork (loras). You know, the old tried and true licensed merchandise model. Everybody gets paid.
- ben_w 3y ago
  Why would those celebs pay Stability any significant money for this, given they can get it for a one off payment of at most a few hundred dollars salary/opportunity cost by paying an intern to gather the images and feed it into the existing free tools for training a LoRA?
  - brandall10 3y ago
    I think in this case the celebs are getting paid for using their likeness.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      That sounds like the "lose money on every sale" philosophy of the first dot-com bubble, only without even the "but make it up in volume" second half.
- sigmoid10 3y ago
  You can already do that with reference images and even for inpainting. No training required. Also no need to pay actors outrageous sums to use their likeness in perpetuity as long as you do business. The licensing still tricky anyways, because even if the face is approved and certified, the entire body and surroundings would also have to be. Otherwise you basically re-invented the celebrity deepfake porn movement. I don't see any A-lister signing up for that.
- numpad0 3y ago
  I think the following isn't said often enough: there must be a reason why there are extremely few celebrities and artists who are cool with AI, and it cannot be something abstract and bureaucratic as copyright concerns although those are problematic. It's just not there yet. GenAI outputs aren't something audiences wants to hang on a wall. It's something that evoke sense of distress. Otherwise everyone's tracing them at least.
JimDabell 3y ago
> Seriously this seemed to be the plan: > Step 1: Release SD for free > Step 2: ??? > Step 3: Profit That’s not true. He was pretty open about the business plan. The plan was to have open foundational models and provide services to governments and corporations that wanted custom models trained on private data, tailored to their specific jurisdictions and problem domains.
- ptero 3y ago
  Was there any traction on this? I cannot imagine government services being early customers. What models would the want?Military -- maybe, for simulation or training, but that requires focus, dedicated effort and a lot of time. My 2c.
  - lumost 3y ago
    I've heard this pitch from a few AI labs. I suspect that they will fail, customers just want a model that works in the shortest amount of time and effort. The vast majority of companies do not have useful fine tuning data or skills. Consultancy businesses are low margin and hard to scale.
throwaway2037 3y ago
First paragraph: These are wild stats. Thank you to share. How did they fund themselves, if no external funding?
Der_Einzige 3y ago
What's insane to me is the fact that the best interfaces to utilize any of these models, from open source LLMs to open source diffusion models, are still random gradio webUIs made by the 4chan/discord anime profile picture crowd. Automatic1111, ComfyUI, Oobabooga. There's more value within these 3 projects than within at least 1 billion dollars worth of money thrown around on yet another podunk VC backed firm with no product. It appears that no one is even trying to seriously compete with them on the two primary things that they excel at - 1. Developer/prosumer focus and 2. extension ecosystem. Also, if you're a VC/Angel reading my comments about this, I would very much love to talk to you.

epivosism 3y ago

Yes, and MJ has no public API either. Same for Ideogram, I imagine they have at least 10m in the bank, and aren't even bothering making an API despite being SoTA for lots of areas.

Satam 3y ago

There's money to be made for sure, and Stability's sloppy execution and strategy definitely didn't help them. But I think there are also industry-wide factors at play that make AI companies quite brittle for now.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

andrewljohnson 3y ago

I wonder if MidJourney is still ripping. I’m actually curious if it’s superior to ChatGPT’s Dall-E images… I switched and cancelled my subscription when ChatGPT added images, but I think I was mostly focused on convenience.

famouswaffles 3y ago
If you have a particular style in mind then results may vary but aesthetically Midjourney is generally still the best, however Dalle-3 has every other model beat in terms of prompt adherence.
Legend2440 3y ago
Image quality, stylistic variety, and resolution are much better than ChatGPT. Prompt following is a little better with ChatGPT, but MJ v6 has narrowed the gap.

teaearlgraycold 3y ago

> $200M in revenue in 2023 with 0 external investments and only 40 employees. The dream

manquer 3y ago
For a founder maybe , definitely not for employees . AI startups need not an insignificant amount of startup capital , you cannot just spend weekends to build like you would a saas app . Model training is expensive so only wealthy individuals can even consider this route Companies like that have no oversight or control mechanisms when management inevitably goes down crazy paths, also without external valuations option vesting structures are hard to ascertain value.
- teaearlgraycold 3y ago
  As a counter-point, with no VCs there's more equity left for employees.
  - hsjsbeebue 3y ago
    If valued $2bn then even a 0.1% is $2m. Not bad.
    - teaearlgraycold 3y ago
      Early employees may have gotten 2-3% and are completely undiluted.
      - hsjsbeebue 3y ago
        Yes indeed! Probably furiously vesting now!
  - khazhoux 3y ago
    As a counter-counter-point that gets rarely discussed on HN, VCs aren't taking as much of the pie as people think. In a 2-founder, 4-engineer company, it wouldn't be unusual to have equity be roughly: 20% investors 70% founders 2-3% employees (1% emp1, 1% emp2, 0.5% emp3, 0.25% emp4) 7% for future employees before next funding round

llm_trw 3y ago

>The vast majority of users couldn't be bothered to take the steps necessary to get it running locally so I don't even think the open sourcing philosophy would have been a serious hurdle to wider commercial adoption. The more I think about the AI space the more I realize that open sourcing large models is pointless now. Until you can reasonably buy a rig to run the model there is simply no point in doing this. It's no like you will be edified by setting the weights either. I think an ethical business model for these business is to release whatever model can fit into a $10,000 machine and keeping the rest closed source until above machine is able to run them.

AnthonyMouse 3y ago
The released image generation models run on consumer GPUs. Even the big LLMs will run on a $3500 Mac with reasonable performance, and the CPU of a dirt cheap machine if you don't care about it being slow, which is sometimes important and sometimes isn't. Also, things like this are in the works: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39794864 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39794864 Which will put the system RAM of the new 24-channel PC servers in range of the Nvidia H100 on memory bandwidth, while using commodity DDR5.
- llm_trw 3y ago
  The `big' AI models are trillion parameter models. The medium sized models like GPT3 and Grok are 185b and 314b respectively. There is no way for _anyone_ to run these on a sub $50k machine in 2024, and even if you can the token generation speed on CPU is under 0.1 tokens per second.
  - GaggiX 3y ago
    ChatGPT is 20B according to Microsoft researchers, also the fact that big AI models are trillion parameter models is mostly speculation, about GPT-4 it was spread by geohot.
    - speedgoose 3y ago

biztos 3y ago

Yes, and I'm grateful to them for sticking to that plan. :-) But for the individuals involved, it might also be Step 2: Leverage fame in AI space for massive VC injection on favorable terms.

blensor 3y ago

Are we sure that Midjourney is still on that trajectory? I was a heavy user since the beginning but my usage has dropped to almost 0

jack_riminton 3y ago
I think you're a sample size of one
- blensor 3y ago
  I mean of course I am a sample size of one when I am speaking about my own experience? That's why I asked that question to see if others notice something similar or if that's just me

jonplackett 3y ago

Leonardo.ai have basically done exactly this and seem to be doing OK. It’s a shame because they’re literally just using stable diffusion for all their tech but built a nicer front end and incorporated control net. No-where else has done this. Controlnet / instantID etc are the really killer things about SD and make it way more powerful than Midjourney, but they aren’t even available via the stability API. They just don’t seem to care.

mikehearn 3y ago
InstantID uses a non-commercial licensed model (from insightface) as part of its pipeline so I think that makes it a no-go for being part of Stability's commercial service.

HlessClaudesman 3y ago

Heres a Stable Diffusion buisness idea: sign up all the celebrities and artists who are cool with AI, and provide end users / fans with an AI image generation interface, trained on their exclusive likenesses / artwork (loras). You know, the old tried and true licensed merchandise model. Everybody gets paid.

ben_w 3y ago
Why would those celebs pay Stability any significant money for this, given they can get it for a one off payment of at most a few hundred dollars salary/opportunity cost by paying an intern to gather the images and feed it into the existing free tools for training a LoRA?
- brandall10 3y ago
  I think in this case the celebs are getting paid for using their likeness.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    That sounds like the "lose money on every sale" philosophy of the first dot-com bubble, only without even the "but make it up in volume" second half.
sigmoid10 3y ago
You can already do that with reference images and even for inpainting. No training required. Also no need to pay actors outrageous sums to use their likeness in perpetuity as long as you do business. The licensing still tricky anyways, because even if the face is approved and certified, the entire body and surroundings would also have to be. Otherwise you basically re-invented the celebrity deepfake porn movement. I don't see any A-lister signing up for that.
numpad0 3y ago
I think the following isn't said often enough: there must be a reason why there are extremely few celebrities and artists who are cool with AI, and it cannot be something abstract and bureaucratic as copyright concerns although those are problematic. It's just not there yet. GenAI outputs aren't something audiences wants to hang on a wall. It's something that evoke sense of distress. Otherwise everyone's tracing them at least.

JimDabell 3y ago

> Seriously this seemed to be the plan: > Step 1: Release SD for free > Step 2: ??? > Step 3: Profit That’s not true. He was pretty open about the business plan. The plan was to have open foundational models and provide services to governments and corporations that wanted custom models trained on private data, tailored to their specific jurisdictions and problem domains.

ptero 3y ago
Was there any traction on this? I cannot imagine government services being early customers. What models would the want?Military -- maybe, for simulation or training, but that requires focus, dedicated effort and a lot of time. My 2c.
- lumost 3y ago
  I've heard this pitch from a few AI labs. I suspect that they will fail, customers just want a model that works in the shortest amount of time and effort. The vast majority of companies do not have useful fine tuning data or skills. Consultancy businesses are low margin and hard to scale.

throwaway2037 3y ago

First paragraph: These are wild stats. Thank you to share. How did they fund themselves, if no external funding?

Der_Einzige 3y ago

What's insane to me is the fact that the best interfaces to utilize any of these models, from open source LLMs to open source diffusion models, are still random gradio webUIs made by the 4chan/discord anime profile picture crowd. Automatic1111, ComfyUI, Oobabooga. There's more value within these 3 projects than within at least 1 billion dollars worth of money thrown around on yet another podunk VC backed firm with no product. It appears that no one is even trying to seriously compete with them on the two primary things that they excel at - 1. Developer/prosumer focus and 2. extension ecosystem. Also, if you're a VC/Angel reading my comments about this, I would very much love to talk to you.