Midjourney opens its beta

Midjourney's open beta began on 12 July 2022, and its interface was a chat room. Users typed a prompt after the word "imagine" in a Discord channel, watched four images resolve from blur alongside everyone else's, and paid ten dollars a month for more. David Holz, who had co-founded the hand-tracking company Leap Motion, ran it with a staff of about ten and took no outside investment. By the end of 2023 the Discord server had sixteen million members and the company was, by report, profitable.

Where DALL·E 2 aimed at faithfulness, Midjourney aimed at beauty, with a house style, painterly, lit and slightly too composed, that became recognisable and then unavoidable. Its images won an art competition at the Colorado State Fair in August 2022, illustrated magazine covers, and produced the photograph of the Pope in a white puffer coat that a large share of the internet believed for a day in March 2023.

It is on this timeline as the first generative product that reached the public through taste rather than technology, and as evidence that the capability, once it existed, would be sold by whoever packaged it best.