This is how Midjourney text-to-image AI has evolved in just one year

When it comes to the race for AI, it’s not just about the speed with which companies are adopting the technology and bringing it to users, but also how quickly these tools evolve and improve their capabilities. The images generated by the first version of DALL-E from a text description, with often unrecognizable faces, appear a distant past when compared to what it currently offers, but it was only in January 2021.

Since then, the competition between text-to-image language models has increased and the ones that stand out the most, next to OpenAI, are Stable Diffusion and Midjourney. The latter, which reached its fifth version this month, just twelve months after its launch, is the best example of the rapidly evolving capabilities of these artificial intelligence systems.

Like the previous examples, Midjourney is a generative artificial intelligence which has been trained with huge databases with all kinds of images. With this information and aided by the precision that the user provides in his prompt generates groups of images from the description entered. The user then chooses the one they like best to get a higher resolution version.

The continuous updates that it is making Midjourney Inc. about its generative artificial intelligence have made it evolve at a dizzying pace, as some of its users have documented on social media.

v1

it’s…something pic.twitter.com/oQH9Swq6eG

— phil desforges ⟠ (@storybyphil) March 16, 2023

v3

some intense styling going on. pic.twitter.com/bHEJUmcyqO

— phil desforges ⟠ (@storybyphil) March 16, 2023

v5

the future is looking bright. pic.twitter.com/6Y7yhSUTbJ

— phil desforges ⟠ (@storybyphil) March 16, 2023

The tool stayed in closed beta from March 2022 to July, the date on which with its version 3 it went to an open beta which any user can access. Last November version 4 arrived and this March version 5, which allows images to be generated with a resolution that doubles that of v4, with more precise details, a more realistic representation of everyday objects and allows prompts more complex for the user.

Having seen the road traveled in just one year, It’s hard to imagine where we’ll be in another twelve months. with this and other generative tools. The only sure thing is that, in a world that is guided by image, the impact will be felt.