Meta said its newly created Superintelligence Labs has struck a licensing agreement with Midjourney, the San Francisco-based startup known for photorealistic AI image and video generation. Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang said the partnership will allow Midjourney’s “aesthetic technology” to be embedded in future Meta models and consumer products, broadening the social-media company’s generative-AI capabilities. Midjourney, founded in 2022, has about 20 million users and was on pace to generate roughly $200 million in subscription revenue last year. Its chief executive, David Holz, stressed that the company will remain independent and has not taken outside funding. Financial terms of the licensing deal were not disclosed, but the arrangement follows Meta’s $14 billion investment in Scale AI and a series of high-profile hires intended to accelerate the firm’s AI roadmap. Separately, Meta plans to unveil its first consumer-ready smart glasses with an integrated display at the Connect developer conference on Sept. 17–18, according to people familiar with the matter cited by CNBC. Codenamed “Hypernova,” the glasses are expected to retail for about $800 and will be sold in partnership with EssilorLuxottica. The device places a small color screen in the right lens, providing a roughly 20-degree field of view for notifications and other simple visuals. It will ship with a neural wristband developed by CTRL Labs that interprets electrical signals from hand movements, allowing users to control the glasses with gestures. Meta also intends to introduce a third-generation, voice-only version of its Ray-Ban smart glasses at the same event. The twin moves—licensing Midjourney’s content-generation technology and expanding into display-equipped eyewear—underscore Meta’s strategy of combining software advances with new hardware to keep pace with rivals such as OpenAI, Google and Apple in the race to commercialize consumer-facing artificial intelligence.
Meta and Midjourney join forces to bring advanced AI image and video tools to users, shaping creative features across Instagram and Facebook. https://t.co/PBYAsuG5UK
Meta anuncia asociación con Midjourney para desarrollar modelos de imágenes y vídeos con IA https://t.co/MKVIOjRkQO
This is an interesting proposition https://t.co/Rzfu4f44sh