The Ledger
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why aren't all 18 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Balaji Srinivasan: New AI models displace older AI models rather than humans
“Another one is AI doesn't take your job, AI takes the job of the previous AI. Claude took ChatGPT's job, right? Just like Midjourney, you know, took took Dali's job, took Stable Diffusion's job.”
Casado: Early AI breakouts gain strong brand effects over model performance differences
“Honestly, last quick point on this is, like, for the first time in a very long time, we're seeing brand effects with an early technology, and what I mean by that is, if you look at, like, whatever, the major model providers, you know, how much better are they …”
Dixon: Modern software network effects are externalized to the web ecosystem
“Maybe a lot of the network effect has been externalized to the internet, right? And so the idea being, you know, your cursor, and then suddenly all of the, you know, it becomes popular or, you know, mid journey, let's say, right? And then you get all of these,…”
Casado: OpenAI lost early leads in code, image, and video to rivals
“It was co-pilot, right? But they lost that. And then they were actually the first to image, really, with Dali. They lost that, right? Mid-Journey came out. They were kind of the first to, like, real video with Sora, and they lost that. And yet, they've gotten …”
Parsons: Midjourney iterates on image models faster than OpenAI
“But then, of course, you have now tools like Midjourney, who've been, like, iterating on their text-to-image model, like, a lot more aggressively than OpenAI, who Understandably, I think maybe have some other things in the cooker, you know, which have now grow…”
Lai: Subscriptions will become default business model for AI games
“My guess is that companies like mid journey or care, like character AI have been able to address this with a subscription model. And so basically every power user pays for their own sort of like inference costs, so to speak. And we could see that subscription …”
Piff Marti Uses Midjourney to Create Album Cover Artwork
“One, it saves me a lot of money as a creative entrepreneur where I can go into a mid journey and then type in a dope prompt and get some artwork so I can use for my album cover.”
Bornstein: OpenAI, Midjourney, and Replicate engineers adopted Cursor early
“Engineers working at the time, the leading AI companies like OpenAI, Midjourney, Replicate, a bunch of others you know, all, all kind of use this and subscribe to this model.”
Justine Moore: Midjourney stands apart for default aesthetic quality
“Yeah, I think there's definitely different styles still, and I think mid-journey, when you talk to people really deep in image and video, it still kind of stands apart for this, like, aesthetic sensibility that a lot of the models don't have if you don't know …”
Casado: ElevenLabs and Midjourney have excellent unit economics
“For AI, for better or for worse, like, you have great unit economics. I mean, you know, everybody knows kind of like when we always talk about the opening eyes and the anthropics, but do you talk like the 11 labs, for example, or mid journey? I mean, these are…”
Casado: Leading AI consumer products launch web-first before releasing APIs
“Anecdotally, other than like, say, maybe like mid-journey and Discord, all of these are web technologies, like ChatGPT, Ideogram, like all of them, Claude, I mean, it seems like that the first place that they land is a website, and then maybe an API, which you…”
Midjourney's public Discord server has around 20 million users
“Yeah, I think their public server is, yeah, it's about that size. It's pretty large.”
Midjourney generates nearly 1% of all invite traffic across Discord
“Like Midjourney itself is driving, you know, close to a percent of all kind of Discord invite traffic, which is very cool.”
Vasquez: Swedish dropout Gabriel Petersson worked at Midjourney and OpenAI before founding
“So this was a high school dropout from Sweden, came to the U.S. With no education, got a job on MidJourney, then became one of the youngest researchers at OpenAI, and now he started a company.”
Moore: Midjourney and Character.ai launched before ChatGPT in 2022
“Actually, Midjourney and Character AI both came out before ChatGBT, which I think a lot of people don't know, but there was maybe these early niche communities of early adopters that were using both of those products in the summer and the fall of twenty-twenty…”
Discord invite traffic predicts which generative AI products will launch top apps
“Like, if you wanted to predict what's gonna be on the list in six months, Looking at the Discord data, you can even track, like, which Discord pages are getting the most invite traffic or things like that as a proxy for interest. And many of those companies th…”
Niji Journey is the most common AI tool for anime art
“You can look at things like Niji journey, which is a fork of mid journey and probably the most common anime to the art asset generation right now.”
Andreessen: Around 100 million people actively use generative AI applications
“And then there's a bottoms up phenomenon, which is it's already long, like people are already experiencing it, right? It's like in the form of, like, GPT and Midjourney and all these other new kind of amazing AI apps that are kind of running wild online. And s…”