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Even three years after its debut, with ever increasing competition in the AI image generation space, Midjourney, the boostrapped San Francisco startup, remains the “gold standard” for its 20 million users — including us here at VentureBeat, where we use it to generate the “header” art to many of our articles.
Apparently, the leaders of Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta feel similarly.
Today, Alexandr Wang, the former Scale AI founder and CEO who has become Meta’s Chief AI Officer and head of the company’s newly formed Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), announced a partnership with Midjourney — believed to be the first of its kind for the independent AI image startup.
Meta will “license their aesthetic technology for our future models and products, bringing beauty to billions,” Wang wrote on X, a rival social network to Meta’s own Threads and Facebook.
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1/ Today we’re proud to announce a partnership with @midjourney, to license their aesthetic technology for our future models and products, bringing beauty to billions. — Alexandr Wang (@alexandr_wang) August 22, 2025
Midjourney had previously reportedly been in discussions with Elon Musk and xAI for some integration with the latter company’s Grok image generation capabilities, but xAI debuted Grok image generation powered by startup Black Forest Labs’ Flux AI image model initially, and now appears to have native image generation capabilities.
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