The pivot to do things they want as AI research lab is perfectly understandable, but also..weird, like their loyal userbase are mostly creative people, and this pivot have ZERO things to do with those audience at all.
It also gives a vibe that they gives zero damn about to those creatives audience, or the things that made name for them in the past anymore, or that what I feel as their subscriber... I know that David Holz have his own unique way of doing things but it's still...weird!
oh, and the hypetrain on X. yikes..
Yeah, exactly. This would have been a cool side project company from the founder and team.
Doing it under their main brand is very weird and I don’t quite see how it translates to creatives at all.
This is somewhat speculative, but as I see it, there are two ways to retain excellent people:
a) You pay them handsomely
b) You do shit they like, they way the like.
Sometimes it overlaps, of course. But this is essentially the reason why people stay in academia in the hard sciences. Most of us could earn considerably more in industry.
I'm not sure midjourney can compete with the bigwigs on a). But doing healthcare stuff is probably more fulfilling to the researchers, and with less "we stole from all the artists" vibes.
Of course, if this all works out, they might me able to do a) easily :)
to be fair I wouldn't call people operating AI Image generators creative people. At best they're people curious about the technology itself, anybody willing to learn and do it for the sake of being creative does it themselves.