Midjourney's technical details are largely proprietary — unlike Stability AI or Black Forest Labs, they don't publish papers or release model weights. What's known: they use diffusion-based architectures, likely with custom fine-tuning on aesthetically curated datasets. Their v6 model introduced significant improvements in text rendering, coherence, and prompt following. The company trains on its own GPU cluster rather than relying on cloud providers.
Midjourney famously launched and scaled through Discord bots, which was both brilliant and limiting. Users type prompts in Discord channels and get images back. This created a social, collaborative environment where users learn from each other's prompts and results. But it also limited the product: no API for developers, no programmatic access, and a UX that's confusing for non-Discord users. The company is transitioning to a standalone web platform to address these limitations.