Midjourney Teases Hardware Product, Hires Apple Vision Pro Headset Engineer

AI image generator company Midjourney is teasing a piece of forthcoming hardware but leaving fans guessing as to what it is.

The company, which generates more than $200 million in revenue without any VC investment, made a post on X (formerly Twitter) Wednesday that it is looking for staff to work on the project at its headquarters in San Francisco.

Midjourney is a small company with less than 100 people working there. However, one notable addition to its workforce earlier this year was ex-Neuralink man Ahmad Abbas. Abbas also worked on the Apple Vision Pro headset which might offer a clue as to what the Midjourney hardware could be.

Tech Crunch notes that Midjourney CEO Davic Holz also had experience in hardware having co-founded Leap Motion — a company which built motion-tracking peripherals. Abbas also worked there with Holz.

For now, the project is shrouded in secrecy with the Midjourney X account refusing to reveal specifics when pressed by a fan saying only “We have multiple efforts in flight.”

The company has previously touted AI models for video and 3D generation so these projects could all be tied in.

While Apple’s headset has not been successful and the virtual reality space, in general, remains quite niche, it would be fascinating to see what a company like Midjourney would come up with if it did choose to go down that route.

It has established itself as one of the biggest players in the AI image generator space despite being dwarfed by some of its much larger competitors like OpenAI, Meta, and Google.

However, Midjourney’s rise has not been without controversy. In an interview with Forbes in 2022, Holz admitted to using hundreds of millions of copyrighted photos to build the AI image generator.

This controversial practice — which is employed by most AI image generator companies — has embroiled Midjourney in a lawsuit with a group of artists suing it and Stable Diffusion for copyright infringement.