Midjourney releases its first new AI image model in nearly a year

Midjourney, one of the earliest AI image-generating services on the web, has released its first new AI image model in nearly a year.

Dubbed V7, the model, which began rolling out in alpha around midnight Eastern on Friday, comes a week after OpenAI debuted a new image generator in ChatGPT that quickly went viral for its ability to create Ghibli-style photos. Midjourney’s is not a Ghibli-optimized model — at least not officially — but nonetheless generates aesthetically pleasing works, at least to this reporter’s dilettante eye.

To use it, you’ll first have to rate around 200 images to build a Midjourney “personalization” profile if you haven’t already. This profile tunes the model to your individual visual preferences; V7 is Midjourney’s first to have personalization switched on by default.

Once you’ve completed that task, you’ll be greeted with a togglable V7 on Midjourney’s website and, if you’re a member of Midjourney’s Discord server, on its Discord chatbot. In the web app, you can quickly select the model from the drop-down menu next to the “version” label.

Image Credits:Midjourney

Midjourney CEO David Holz described V7 as a “totally different architecture” in a post on X.

“V7 is […] much smarter with text prompts,” Holz continued in an announcement on Discord. “[I]mage prompts look fantastic, image quality is noticeably higher with beautiful textures, and bodies, hands, and objects of all kinds have significantly better coherence on all details.”

V7 is available in two flavors, Turbo and Relax — the former of which is more costly to run — and powers a new tool called Draft Mode that renders images at 10x the speed and half the cost of the standard mode. Draft images are lower-quality than standard-mode images, but can be enhanced and re-rendered with a click of the mouse.

We're now beginning the alpha-test phase of our new V7 image Model. It's our smartest, most beautiful, most coherent model yet. Give it a shot and expect updates every week or two for the next two months. pic.twitter.com/Ogqt0fgiY7

— Midjourney (@midjourney) April 4, 2025

A number of Midjourney capabilities aren’t available yet for V7, according to Holz, including image upscaling and retexturing. Those will arrive in the near future, he said — possibly as soon as within two months.

“This is an entirely new model with unique strengths and probably a few weaknesses” Holz wrote on Discord. “[W]e want to learn from you what it’s good and bad at, but definitely keep in mind it may require different styles of prompting. So play around a bit.”

My prompt: “A dragon with a spiky tail.”Image Credits:Midjourney

In my brief testing, V7 adhered reasonably well to the prompts I gave it. Granted, I didn’t have time to really put the model through the ringer.

My prompt: “A Ghibli-style character.”Image Credits:Midjourney

Midjourney is an unusual operation. Started in 2022 by Holz, who co-founded PC peripheral company Leap Motion, it hasn’t taken a dime of outside money.

In late 2023, Midjourney was reportedly expecting to bring in around $200 million in revenue. Recently, the San Francisco-based firm said that it was establishing a hardware team to work on undisclosed projects, and it continues to train previously announced models for video and 3D object generation.

Several lawsuits accuse Midjourney of infringing on the rights of millions of artists by training AI tools on images scraped from the web without the consent of the images’ creators.