In the AI space dominated by big names including OpenAI, Google and Microsoft, a plucky startup has managed to make its presence felt. Midjourney is an AI image generation company that is amongst the most popular tools to generate images. It was one of the earliest companies that was able to generate high-quality AI images at scale, and continues to be known as one of the best AI image generators around. But not many people know how Midjourney got its name.
Midjourney is an unusual name for an AI image generator — it doesn’t reference AI or images. The name Midjourney, instead, has its roots in an ancient Chinese work. “The name Midjourney actually came from one of my favorite translations of an ancient Taoist text, but it came from Zhuangzi,” Midjourney founder David Holz said in an interview. “The reason why I love the word mid journey is I feel like it’s, it’s easy to sometimes forget the past, and it’s kind of easy to feel kind of lost and uncertain about the future. But more than anything, I feel like we’re actually mid journey, and that we come from this rich and beautiful past, and ahead of us is this, this wild and unimaginable, invaluable future,” he added.
“Lots of people in tech act like we have no past, and many regular people act like we have no future, but I’ve always felt we are very much mid-journey. We have a rich and unbelievable past behind us and a vast and unimaginable future ahead,” he elaborated on X.
Zhuangzi was a significant figure in Chinese philosophy, particularly in the development of Daoism. He is believed to have lived from approximately 369 BCE to 286 BCE during the Warring States period in ancient China. The word mid journey appears in one of his writings, and was the inspiration for the name of the company Mid journey.