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- AI Natives #24 - Midjourney's Christmas Present
AI Natives #24 - Midjourney's Christmas Present
Midjourney announces v6, Anthropic is cash hungry and Stability commits faux pas
Kornel Grunwald
December 24, 2023
Hey there, #TheAINatives! 🤖
Happy to have you here joining us with the twenty-fourth issue of The AI Natives.
No changes here!
The reason why this issue of the AI Natives comes late to your inbox is simple: I could not resist the idea of sending 24th issue of AI Natives on 24th of December and wish you all the best!
So Happy Christmas! No matter what your beliefs are, I hope you will all have a great time to spend with your family and enjoy some reflection, relax and a good read, while so many parts of the world are going into Holidays! All the best!🎄🎅❄️
Secondary reason is that I was travelling on Thursday and Friday to meet with my family, but this will be our secret, okay? 😊
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A note on 🚩, 💚or 🟠 being next to the news title in the sections below. This is expression of my take, whether I see the news as positive or dangerous. We will delve deeper into dangers of AI going onward, as there is not enough being discussed in that space.
Here we go with the big news⏬
CONVO OVER COFFEE ☕
Big topics to discuss with friends and colleagues
Midjourney v6 is out 🚩
Midjourney, a beacon of bootstrapped businesses in the VC dominated world of AI, rolled out v6 of their core model. One that, according to representatives of the company, is to deliver unprecedented level of detail and delivers an overhaul of the prompting system.
My take: Hyperrealism of the Midjourney model, novel features they introduce and their work on a new website and prompting system means that gradually the company aims to bring itself into mainstream market. This is a proprietary model, but company lacks distribution channels that folks from OpenAI have with their DALL-e models. However, tendency is clear - the creation of new images is going to be easier, with better accessibility and quality closer to those of professional graphic designers than ever.
Anthropic goes after big cash 🟠
My take: The news about Anthropic aiming for the new cash injection are insane. Here is why: they have so much money already!
$124 million Series A.
$580 million Series B.
$300 million from Google.
$450 million Series C.
A commitment of more than $1 billion from Sapphire Ventures LLC.
$100 million from SK Telecom Co. Ltd.
A commitment of up to $4 billion from Amazon.
A commitment of up to $2 billion from Google.
Perhaps it does it to ramp up their legal teams after change in ToC 🚩
This is not the first instance when companies promise to protect their customers with legal problems that Gen AI can produce. Microsoft, among others, announced similar support quite recently.
So it did happen: Stability AI introduces memberships for users 🚩🚩🚩
Stability AI announced that in order to strike a balance between openness and profitability, it will effectively gate access to their models behind a subscription fee.
My take: While in itself is a normal pricing strategy, it is at least to say controversial to perform as a company building it’s position thanks to open-source communities. If I would be a developer, a hobbyist, an open source contributor to engage with StabilityAI projects in the past - I would run away now, far far away.
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