A much longer followup V8 post from our blog: Hi everyone! Today we’re letting the community test an early version of our V8 model on alpha.midjourney.com. We want your feedback and your help. Let’s explore what this new model can do. V8 is an incredible model. It’s much better at following detailed directions and will still surprise you when you ask. Its ability to understand your aesthetics through personalization, style references (srefs) and moodboards is amazing. Images are more coherent and detailed. Text rendering works better than ever (when specified in “quotes”). And image generation is ~5x faster than before. We’ve upgraded our web interfaces to support this speed. And more is coming. We have an improved conversation mode so you can just ‘talk’ in flow, a “Grid Mode” so you can focus on a single big set of images, and we’ve moved our settings into ‘sidebars’ so you can tweak settings without blocking your view. V8 launches with support for multiple aspect ratios, --chaos, --weird, --exp, --raw. We support backwards compatibility with your V7 personalization profiles, moodboards, and srefs. V8 brings a new --hd mode which natively renders images at 2K resolution and a --q 4 mode if you need a little bit of extra coherence. Modes and Pricing: Presently, Relax is not yet supported. We are working on a new server cluster for Relax plus cheaper render modes. --HD, --Q4, SREF, and Moodboard jobs are 4x as slow as regular jobs and each costs 4x (for now). The best way to help us improve V8 is to rate images in the lightbox. Click an image in create then click “I like this image” “I don't like this image” on as many of your V8 images as possible. You can use 1/2/3 hotkeys and arrow keys to rate images quickly. Other Tips and Tricks: If you’re going for photos or a more ‘plain’ or ‘in control’ look we’d recommend switching to --raw right away or using moodboards or srefs to control your style. We’re still working on the ‘default’ aesthetics of V8, but we strongly encourage you to use your personalization and even crank it to –stylize 1000 asap. V8 is going to shine most right now when you rely heavily on our stylization systems and when you trend towards longer more specific prompting. Please Note: This is an entirely new model with unique strengths and weaknesses, we want to learn from you what it's good and bad at but keep in mind it may require totally new prompting styles. So play around a bit! It’s time to play! Show off what you’re making in #v8-showcase and let us know what you think in #ideas-and-feedback. As the model becomes more mature, we’ll do a community-wide roadmap ranking session to help us figure out what to prioritize next. Thanks again for everyone’s help with the V8 pre-release rating parties, and thank you so much for being a part of Midjourney! Let’s have fun out there and find new wonders on this vast and shared sea of imagination.