Midjourney Unveils V7: Its Exciting New AI Image Model in Nearly a Year

The new model, dubbed V7, began rolling out in alpha around midnight EST on Thursday. It comes a week after OpenAI debuted a new image generator in ChatGPT that quickly went viral for its ability to create Ghibli-style photos. However, Midjourney's recent release is not a Ghibli-optimized model, but it nonetheless can generate aesthetically pleasing works.

Peak Innovation 

We’re now beginning the alpha-test phase of our new V7 image Model. It’s our smartest, most beautiful, most coherent model yet. Give it a shot, and expect updates every week or two for the next two months. 

— Midjourney (@midjourney) April 4, 2025

To use it, you’ll first have to rate around 200 images to build a Midjourney “personalization” profile if you haven’t already. This profile tunes the model to your individual visual preferences; V7 is Midjourney’s first model to have personalization switched on by default.

Once you’ve done that, you’ll be able to turn V7 on or off on Midjourney’s website and, if you’re a member of Midjourney’s Discord server, on its Discord chatbot. In the web app, you can quickly select the model from the drop-down menu next to the “version” label.

A Different Proposition 

The comments on the new release have been flooding in, with Midjourney CEO David Holz describing V7 as a “totally different architecture” in a post on X.

“V7 is much smarter with text prompts,” Holz continued in an announcement on Discord. “[I]mage prompts look fantastic, image quality is noticeably higher with beautiful textures, and bodies, hands, and objects of all kinds have significantly better coherence on all details.”

V7 is available in two flavors, Turbo, which is costlier to run, and Relax, and powers a new tool called Draft Mode that renders images at 10x the speed and half the cost of the standard mode. Draft images are of lower quality than standard-mode images, but they can be enhanced and re-rendered with a click.

Several standard Midjourney features aren’t available yet for V7, according to Holz, including image upscaling and retexturing. Those will arrive soon, he said, possibly within two months.

“This is an entirely new model with unique strengths and probably a few weaknesses,” Holz wrote on Discord. “[W]e want to learn from you what it’s good and bad at, but keep in mind it may require different styles of prompting. So, play around a bit.”