Taking a break from complaining about Google Gemini’s racially confused AI imagery, Marc Andreessen and his compatriots on the mega VC agency Andreseen Horowitz (a16z) have upped their funding in a rival picture era startup, Ideogram, main the agency’s $80 million Sequence A financing, the 2 corporations introduced right this moment.
As well as, Martin Casado, Common Associate at a16z, is becoming a member of Ideogram’s board, and the corporate right this moment introduced a brand new model of its “educated from scratch” picture producing mannequin, Ideogram 1.0, that “provides state-of-the-art textual content rendering, unprecedented photorealism and immediate adherence, and a brand new function known as Magic Immediate,” in response to a weblog publish by the corporate.
Ideogram 1.0 is presently out there for customers to strive free of charge on the corporate’s web site, although it requires a Google or Apple account to log in. Customers can even generate photos from inside the firm’s Discord server.
The corporate provides a free tier for customers capped at 100 picture generations per day, alongside monthlty subscriptions permitting 400 each day photos ($7 month-to-month, billed yearly as Fundamental tier), and limitless each day photos ($16 per thirty days, billed yearly as Plus tier).
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Additionally becoming a member of in Ideogram’s $80 million Sequence A are prior investor Index Ventures, alongside newcomers Redpoint Ventures, Pear VC, and SV Angel. The corporate’s seed spherical was beforehand led by a16z and joined by AIX Ventures, Golden Ventures, Two Small Fish Ventures, and business specialists Ryan Dahl, Anjney Midha, Raquel Urtasun, Jeff Dean, Sarah Guo, Pieter Abbeel, Mahyar Salek, Soleio, Tom Preston-Werner, and Andrej Karpathy.
Textual content and typography era in AI photos is not a uniquely differentiating function
Based by ex Google Mind AI researchers, Ideogram made waves when it first debuted in August 2023 by providing textual content and typography baked straight into AI generated photos, one thing that rivals corresponding to Midjourney didn’t supply on the time.
Nonetheless, the sport has since modified significantly since then, with not solely Midjourney introducing textual content era inside photos as a part of its V6 launch, but in addition OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 introducing the function for its customers as effectively (accessible through ChatGPT). For instance, it’s potential to have AI photos generated with characters holding up indicators which have messages printed on them, or storefronts with legible signage.
These days, letter formation is extra accessible by way of a bunch of AI picture turbines, which suggests Ideogram’s differentiator is lessened. Nonetheless, the outcomes usually are not at all times constant or aligned with what the consumer prompted, and Ideogram identified in its weblog publish saying 1.0 and the Sequence A right this moment that its analysis reveals human evaluators choose Ideogram over Midjourney V6 and DALL-E 3. See the next graphs to assist these fundings:
But Ideogram additionally stood out when it first launched by providing customers the flexibility to pick out from a spread of pre-curated picture kinds corresponding to “3D rendering, cinematic, portray, vogue, product, illustration, conceptual artwork, ukiyo-e.” Now the web site has additional advanced to incorporate choices for various facet ratios, picture weights, public/non-public visibility of generations to different Ideogram customers, and a toggle to activate the brand new Magic Immediate function (described additional down on this piece).
However Ideogram nonetheless seeks to face out with new options
Ideogram isn’t resting on its laurels, both. The corporate’s latest function, Magic Immediate, routinely expands on user-inputted textual content prompts to make them extra descriptive and detailed, producing ideally extra top quality imagery.
Nonetheless, this function too is just like OpenAI’s integration of DALL-E 3 picture producing AI with ChatGPT, which additionally takes a consumer’s textual content immediate and modifies it routinely with new, extra vividly descriptive language, all within the background and invisible to the consumer.
These options make sense in that they might help a consumer higher talk with the underlying AI mannequin, successfully translating what the consumer wrote right into a extra machine-friendly format, with out the consumer having to do the work of trial and error (although in our expertise, a few of that is additionally nonetheless required).
Whereas undoubtedly thrilling for the burgeoning AI artwork group and probably enterprise customers and entrepreneurs, the arrival of Ideogram 1.0 and its continued funding to construct out the product may also doubtless result in a rise in spammy AI picture generations — already a rising downside on the net — as latest examples present.
VentureBeat makes use of Ideogram, Midjourney, DALL-E 3 and different AI instruments to create article imagery.
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