Why Apple’s lost AI master could be Meta's next victim
Midjourney's Meta partnership is brilliant, but startups that enter Mark Zuckerberg's gravity well don't always emerge intact.
It has been almost exactly a year since Midjourney founder David Holz announced that the company was “getting into hardware.” The surprising reveal from the AI company stoked wild speculation. What could a relatively small AI image generation startup do in hardware?
Perhaps a 3D visualizer frame device along the lines of the Looking Glass Portrait? Or maybe a return to his innovative gesture-based roots from his previous startup, Leap Motion, with some next-generation AI-focused interface device? Holz hinted at a data capture device last year, but that seems…so mundane, almost like a head fake. Could it be that he and former Apple Vision Pro engineer Ahmad Abbas, Midjourney’s Head of Hardware, who joined him in 2023, are cooking up an AI-powered headset to work for the company’s 21 million users generating AI images on Discord?
Anything is possible, but if that last idea is anywhere close to being true, then Midjourney's new partnership with Meta suddenly becomes exponentially weirder.
Mark Zuckerberg has spent most of the last decade reshaping Palmer Luckey’s Oculus VR startup, which Meta acquired in 2014 for $2 billion, into his real-world version of Neal Stephenson’s fictional Snow Crash metaverse. Incidentally, Stephenson, the man who coined the term Zuckerberg named his company after, spent much of this week trying to get his Facebook account back after having it suspended for impersonating someone noteworthy. Believe it or not, dear reader, this is a kind of foreshadowing for the rest of our tale.
The Devil You Know
But back to headsets. Why, if Midjourney is harnessing Abbas’ Apple Vision Pro expertise and Holz’s own immersive interface background to develop the first truly AI-native immersive headset, are they playing footsie with Zuckerberg and his vision of the metaverse—and now AI dominance?
The deal, announced last week by Alexandr Wang, the founder of Scale AI (which Meta gobbled up 49% of in June for $14.3 billion, with Wang moving over to Meta), isn’t framed as an acquisition. Instead, Meta is calling the partnership a deal to “license [Midjourney’s] aesthetic technology for our future models and products, bringing beauty to billions.”
Apparently, the reported $300 million pay packages Meta is offering to woo AI engineers from rival AI labs are not enough, Midjourney must also be folded into its plans.
“To ensure Meta is able to deliver the best possible products for people it will require taking an all-of-the-above approach,” Wang said of the Midjourney deal. “This means world-class talent, ambitious compute roadmap, and working with the best players across the industry.”
Midjourney’s Meta pairing, even at arm’s length, is somewhat surprising given Holz’s history with tech giants sniffing around his startups. Back in his Leap Motion days, Apple circled his company several times as early as 2013, later offering upwards of $50 million for the company valued at roughly $300 million at the time. But Holz, the CTO of the company, wasn’t interested, reportedly saying, “I’m never going to go work for those guys—they're the devil.”
Leap Motion ultimately sold to UK-based Ultraleap for $30 million in 2019. But still, the question remains: If Apple and its rounded edges, sustainable campus, and feel-good image were the “devil” in 2018, what, exactly, is Facebook, er, Meta, in the eyes of Holz in 2025? A mischievous imp, you have to keep your eye on? Or, something else?
Sure, Apple CEO Tim Cook isn’t a developer, and Zuckerberg is (at least he was), so maybe Holz can somehow relate more to the newly MMA-ified tech bro versus Apple’s CEO-cum-supply chain master and his army of compliant corporate apparatchiks. A protean intellect like Holz probably wouldn’t do well disappearing into Apple’s flying saucer corporate halls, only to occasionally emerge to bounce around on stage at WWDC.
But is Meta really much different?
Sleeping With the AI Frenemy
It’s worth noting that the Apple Vision Pro’s touchless gesture control system is very reminiscent of Holz’s Leap Motion system, which I used when it debuted in 2013. That, along with Abbas, means that, had it not been for Holz’s Cupertino aversion, it’s possible the Midjourney founder might have helped make the Vision Pro more mainstream-friendly, and perhaps sped Apple’s path toward AI internally.
As it stands, Meta is now closer to Holz than Apple ever was.
Holz’s new relationship with Meta, in contrast to Apple, seems even more incongruous if you’ve ever listened in on one of his many Midjourney office hour talks. In unfiltered mode, he expounds at length before a virtual audience of thousands of dedicated users about his vision of the future of technology, its philosophical—and even metaphysical—underpinnings, as well as the state of Midjourney’s development as a company. I’ve sat through several and, if you’re patient and a good listener, Holz is an inspiring speaker.
But his free association in service of innovation approach doesn’t seem like the kind that would be welcome at Cook’s Apple nor Zuckerberg’s Meta, so this licensing deal may be what it appears to be, and nothing more.
However, that would be underestimating Zuckerberg. His pattern of business strategy is pretty clear now if we track the history of Facebook/Meta back over the past couple of decades. It’s really quite simple:
First, buy versus build. That is, acquire technology companies for a reasonable price.
Next, if you can’t acquire the company outright, partner with it, and then gradually acqui-hire the team.
If that doesn’t work, copy… aggressively and rapidly.
Shakespeare wrote that the past is prologue, and Zuckerberg’s many strategic contrails serve as the embodiment of that classic phrase. Like Stephenson’s disappearing status on the very platform named after the world in his seminal novel, the ground beneath anyone partnering with Meta can shift at a moment’s notice.
A quick look back at Zuckerberg’s engagements with companies (above) illuminates what Midjourney may have to contend with in the next 24 months as it does its best snake charmer routine, “licensing” its stunning, near-human aesthetic AI image generation tech to Meta.