GPU shortage holding back Midjourney website

The ongoing shortage of GPUs capable of crunching through AI workloads is delaying the release of Midjourney’s long-awaited ability to generate images via its website.

Midjourney is one of the most advanced generative AI art services out there, but users currently have to use the Discord chat service when generating images. That creates a barrier to usage, especially when compared to rivals such as DALL-E or Adobe Firefly, both of which have web interfaces.

Midjourney has long stated its ambition to generate images on the web and has recently revamped its website in preparation for such a facility, but the company is nervous of pushing ahead with the feature while GPU supplies remain constrained.

At the company’s weekly “Office Hours” meeting for Midjourney users, the company admitted that GPU shortages were “affecting server deployments and capacity for additional users”, according to the notes taken by James Griffing, which he published on Discord.

Consequently, the company was being cautious about “opening the website to avoid running out of computing resources”, Griffing’s notes added.

The company went on to add that it was carefully managing its GPU resources to ensure service quality for existing users, who pay a minimum of $10 per month to access the service, and that it currently planned to fully open the website to the public in late February or March.

Midjourney website improvements

That’s not to say work on the Midjourney website has ground to a halt, with the company announcing a batch of new features for the site just yesterday.

There’s now a persistent search bar on the website, so users who are looking for inspiration for prompts can enter terms such as “tornado”. They will then see all the results for prompts that have used that keyword. Image results are displayed with their prompts, so users can copy and amend the prompts to generate their own images.

The site also now provides more options for sorting and filtering users’ images. For example, subscribers can now create folders for their own creations, making it easier to find images created for a specific project. Filtering options now let you sort images by aspect ratio, the version of Midjourney used or by rating.

It’s also now possible to click and drag across multiple images in the web interface for bulk downloading.