the orb —
It hired a hardware chief who previously worked on Apple Vision Pro.
Responding to this meme image of a wizard with an orb from the I.C.E. book Middle-earth: Valar and Maiar, Midjourney's founder joked that the new hardware form factor might be an orb.
I.C.E.
Midjourney, a company best known for its robust AI image-generation tool, has publicly announced that it's "getting into hardware" and has invited job-seekers to apply to join its new hardware division.
The company shared the announcement on its official X account earlier today.
Midjourney founder David Holz previously worked at a hardware company; he was CTO of Leap Motion. A few months ago, he hired Ahmad Abbas, whom he worked with at Leap Motion. Abbas also worked at Apple for five years as a hardware manager working on the Vision Pro headset. His LinkedIn profile now lists his current title as "Head of Hardware, Midjourney."
Nothing is yet known about what kind of device Midjourney will develop, but that X account has posted numerous tweets today that could give Internet sleuths insight into exactly what its plans are. For example, it posted that the device is "not gonna be a pendant" in the wake of a rash of multiple recent failed pendant-like AI hardware devices.
The company tweeted that it has "multiple efforts in flight" when asked for more details about the device and noted that there are "definitely opportunities for more form factors."
If you really want to stretch, you can look back to the fact that Holz months ago tweeted, "we will make the orb" in response to a fellow X user joking that someone ought to make a device with a spherical form factor inspired by wizards' spheres from fantasy stories, like Saruman's palantír from The Lord of the Rings.
In case it's not obvious, both Midjourney and Holz have been prolific on X with teases and trolls about it to the point that you probably shouldn't read too much into anything they've said beyond the commitment to produce some kind of hardware.
There's no timeline, either, so it might be a while before we see what happens. At this point, Midjourney is just one of many companies trying to figure out what AI-driven hardware will look like.