Midjourney (MJ) is a well-known text to image generative artificial intelligence (AI). Every Wednesday founder David Holz holds a live meeting on their official discord server where he updates the community on the behind the scenes and does a Q and A. More information on dates and time can be found at the top of the channel list on the Discord Server under the name Midjourney. Look for the “Event”. This blog is based on notes I took while listening to Office Hours on 1 March 2023. I am not affiliated with Midjourney.
The team is currently gearing up for the release of their V5 model and expanding their workforce to focus more on website improvements. They've experienced a few outages on the website due to the influx of images being uploaded.
To celebrate the upcoming V5 launch, the team will be throwing a ratings party featuring plain-looking, yet higher resolution images with more detail and correctness. The catch? There will also be some "shitty" images included as they are re-renderings of user prompts from V4. Don't freak out though, occasional NSFW images may pop up as it's not a curated collection. The aim is to gather feedback from users on what direction the model should take. Following this, a second ratings party will be held with a more opinionated view of what V5 could look like, followed by the alpha release of V5, possibly as early as next week. V5 will not have an explicit upscaler in the initial release, but the raw image will be 1024x1024, the same size as upscaled V4 images. It will also only be releasing in 1:1 aspect ratio. Not to worry more aspect ratios coming soon and Tile will be releasing with V5 to keep us occupied while we wait.
The team is hoping to release smaller, more attainable versions from now on with V6 and V7 releasing relatively quickly after the V5 launch. With the new ratings system, they're not entirely sure how it will affect the model, but they're excited to just release it and see where it takes them.
The V5 ratings party will initially be released to users in the 10K and 25K groups to ensure that the new system doesn't break under heavy load, before opening it up to everyone else.
The team is looking at adding a new image-to-text feature called "/describe," which allows users to get a text prompt from an image. It's not perfect yet and runs slowly, but they're hoping to improve it with the release of V5.
In addition, there are new changes to the website that haven't been announced yet. Search should work better, allowing users to search through a "fuckton" of images quickly. They've also hired a new person to focus on the database full-time, so we can use our gallery search just as well hopefully soon.
Peter Mohrbacher continues to host weekly events on Tuesdays, and they encourage everyone to come and participate.
Overall, the team is excited to release V5 and see how it evolves. They're grateful for everyone's help in the upcoming ratings party and encourage users to have fun rating the pictures
