MidJourney
Article
MidJourney is a recurring brand in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between September 12, 2022 and July 08, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “MidJourney announced July 2022”; “MidJourney: Forgot to test this one!”; “random nobody startups came out with … MidJourney”. It most often appears alongside GPT, Scott, AI.
Metadata
- Category: Brands
- Mention count: 4
- Issue count: 4
- First seen: September 12, 2022
- Last seen: July 08, 2025
Appears In
- I Won My Three Year AI Progress Bet In Three Months
- OpenAI’s “Planning For AGI And Beyond”
- Highlights From The Comments On Fetishes
- Now I Really Won That AI Bet
Related Pages
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- GPT (3 shared issues)
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- Scott (3 shared issues)
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- AI (2 shared issues)
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- DALL-E2 (2 shared issues)
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- Gary Marcus (2 shared issues)
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- Google (2 shared issues)
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- Google Imagen (2 shared issues)
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- StableDiffusion (2 shared issues)
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- Vitor (2 shared issues)
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- 2020 election (1 shared issues)
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- 4o (1 shared issues)
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- ACX (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
DeepMind thought they were establishing a lead in 2008, but OpenAI has caught up to them. OpenAI thought they were establishing a lead the past two years, but a few months after they came out with GPT, at least Google, Facebook, and Anthropic had comparable large language models; a few months after they came out with DALL-E, random nobody startups came out with StableDiffusion and MidJourney. None of this research has established a commanding lead, it’s just moved everyone forward together and burned timelines for no reason.
Midjourney 5 had not come out, and so we were using 4 to generate some characters for our app.
Then Midjourney 5 came out and started behaving a lot better. Feet were pretty trivial to generate (and hands reliably had 5 fingers) and the excitement of seeing them quickly wore off.
One of the questions on the 2023 - 2024 ACX prediction contest was whether any AI would win the bet by the end of 2023. In order to resolve the question, Edwin and his Surge team returned to the image mines in January 2024. They checked DALL-E3 and Midjourney; I’m including only the pictures from DALL-E3, which did better. Here they are:
Inline links: Here they are