alt Hacker NewsNo external funding raised. They're not on the VC path, so no need to chase insane growth. They still have around 500M USD in ARR.
In my (very personal) opinion, they're part of a very small group of organizations that sell inference under a sane and successful business model.
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They're working on a few really lofty ideas:
1. real time world models for the "holodeck". It has to be fast, high quality, and inexpensive for lots of users. They started on this two years ago before "world model" hype was even a thing.
2. some kind of hardware to support this.
David Holz talks about this on Twitter occasionally.
Midjourney still has incredible revenue. It's still the best looking image model, even if it's hard to prompt, can't edit, and has artifacting. Every generation looks like it came out of a magazine, which is something the other leading commercial models lack.
Not on the VC path. Not even on the max-profit path. Just on the "Have fun doing cool research" path.
I was a mod on MJ for its first few years and got to know MJ's founder through discussions there. He already had "enough" money for himself from his prior sale of Leap Motion to do whatever he wanted. And, he decided what he wanted was to do cool research with fun people. So, he started MJ. Now he has far more money than before and what he wants to do with it is to have more fun doing more cool research.