Midjourney is traveling into AI hardware territory – because that's apparently what you do

(Image credit: Midjourney)

Midjourney is famous for being among the better AI image generators, but now the company is looking to get into hardware, too. The company announced the shift in strategy on X (formerly Twitter) by soliciting people to apply to join the new team.

There aren't a lot of details about what kind of hardware Midjourney is looking to build. In follow-up posts, Midjourney said it won't be a pendant and that it has "different form factors" under consideration. The company hinted it would create something more immersive, though it may have been a joke when one post described the hardware as something to "go inside of."

Though Midjourney is looking to staff up for the hardware team, there is at least one major name on board. Midjourney hired former Apple Vision Pro headset Hardware Engineering Manager Ahmad Abbas as the head of its hardware division last year. Abbas has a history with Midjourney CEO David Holz dating back to their time together at Leap Motion and has the virtual reality and hardware credentials to support some ambitious ideas at Midjourney.

Midjourney Races On

Midjourney’s foray into hardware comes at a time when the company is facing stiff competition from other AI image creators, including Flux, which is embedded on X through the Grok AI chatbot, as well as the recently upgraded Ideogram. Diversifying into hardware makes sense on the face of it, but AI devices have had a rough path. That might be why Midjourney explicitly rejected the idea of a pendant, which is what the Humane AI Pin and new NotePin from Plaud.ai look like, and not too different from the Rabbit R1 device either.

Excitement among Midjourney’s fans aside, the company will have to do something to stand out as innovative if it wants its hardware to be interesting, useful, and well-received. Not even tech giants like Meta or Snapchat can reach their sales goals for AI-powered devices like their smart glasses. Still, it’s fun to imagine what the Midjourney's hardware might be Perhaps it would involve more direct interaction with the AI-generated visuals it produces or even crossing over into the much-vaunted and now quietly ignored realm of the metaverse.

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Eric Hal Schwartz is a freelance writer for TechRadar with more than 15 years of experience covering the intersection of the world and technology. For the last five years, he served as head writer for Voicebot.ai and was on the leading edge of reporting on generative AI and large language models. He's since become an expert on the products of generative AI models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google Gemini, and every other synthetic media tool. His experience runs the gamut of media, including print, digital, broadcast, and live events. Now, he's continuing to tell the stories people want and need to hear about the rapidly evolving AI space and its impact on their lives. Eric is based in New York City.