Midjourney is stepping into the electronics industry as the AI company recently announced that it is looking to assemble a new team for building hardware in San Francisco, US. “We're officially getting into hardware,” Midjourney wrote in a post on X dated Wednesday, August 28. However, it did not disclose more details about what type of gadget it was looking to develop. “We aren't announcing anything specific yet, but we have multiple efforts in flight,” the company said. In February 2024, Midjourney hired Ahmad Abbas, a former employee of Elon Musk-owned Neuralink. Abbas also played a role in engineering Apple’s mixed reality headset, Vision Pro, according to a report by TechCrunch. Additionally, Midjourney CEO David Holz has experience in building hardware as he co-founded a company called Leap Motion that worked on motion-tracking peripherals. Midjourney is mostly known for its popular AI image generator that has reportedly helped to generate revenue of more than $200 million. It has been named in several lawsuits that accuse Midjourney of using copyrighted material to train its AI model. The company is currently working on developing AI models for video creation as well. Meanwhile, OpenAI could also be venturing into the hardware space as it has backed a startup working on AI-enabled devices. The Sam Altman-led organisation recently led a $60 million funding round for Opal, which makes webcams, according to a report by The Information. The ChatGPT parent is also reportedly eyeing its own line of AI chips. The Information reported that OpenAI is in talks with semiconductor designers to develop AI chips, which would help the startup address supply chain shortages and reduce its dependency on Nvidia.
