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Update, 11:35PT: Hours after running this post, I received a late-night reply from Midjourney CEO David Holz himself, in answer to my email with the subject line, "Confirm Midjourney holodeck announcement?", which cited the below quote attributed to him, then asked if that characterization was accurate.
Holz's one sentence reply: "roughly correct quote yes".
So it does indeed look like Midjourney is aiming to build some kind of real-time open world holodeck in 2024!
In a follow-up, I asked Holz if Midjourney advisor (and Second Life founder) Philip Rosedale is involved in this effort. Will further update this post if that's also confirmed! I've also amended the original post title accordingly.
Original post (first published 4:33pm PT) below:
I've reached out to official channels to confirm this (or not), but according to some attendees (as here and here), Midjourney CEO David Holz made a pretty amazing announcement during the startup's open office hours earlier this week.
Specifically, he apparently suggested Midjourney is preparing to deploy a metaverse platform of some kind.
As attendee Nick St. Pierre on Twitter/X quotes Holz:
[H]e thinks they “can get to the holodeck” by 2024.
“We’re gonna build a lot of stuff this year. I think we’ll build more stuff than I’ve ever built before…By the end of 2024 hopefully we have real-time open worlds.”
Normally I would be instantly skeptical about this as hearsay or a misinterpretation. For one thing, while Midjourney outputs 2D images and video, creating a dynamic, immersive virtual world isn't simply a matter of generating 3D graphics, for reasons explained here.
But here's the thing: Second Life founder Philip Rosedale is a lead advisor at Midjourney.
He's listed as such on the startup's hompage. But this may be a coincidence, of course, and Holz's comments this week might have been mischaracterized; hopefully I get some kind of official reply on this.
Midjourney CEO in office hours just said he thinks they “can get to the holodeck” by 2024 😳
“We’re gonna build a lot of stuff this year. I think we’ll build more stuff than I’ve ever built before…By the end of 2024 hopefully we have real-time open worlds”
Holy shit
— Nick St. Pierre (@nickfloats) January 3, 2024
And if you attended this week's Midjourney office hours, dear reader, please recount what was said in Comments!
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