Who is David Holtz, CEO of image generation AI 'Midjourney'? From co-founding 'Leap Motion' in 2008 to developing Midjourney



Midjourney, an AI that automatically generates images from text, is operated by an AI startup company of the same name. It has been about a year and a half since Midjourney was established, and despite not having received a single yen of investment from venture capitalists, Midjourney has posted annual revenues of $200 million (approximately 29 billion yen). I am. Midjourney's CEO is David Holtz, who previously co-founded Leap Motion .

David Holz | Biography, Midjourney Founder & CEO - AiTuts
https://aituts.com/david-holz/

Can Midjourney CEO David Holz Stop a Storm of Fake Election Images in 2024? - Bloomberg
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-01-02/can-midjourney-ceo-david-holz-stop-a-storm-of-fake-election-images-in-2024

Mr. Holtz was born and raised in southern Florida, USA. My father was a ship's dentist and worked on a computer. As a result, Mr. Holtz became interested in computers from an early age. Furthermore, there were many elderly people in her hometown and she didn't have many friends to play with, so she spent a lot of time alone. As a result, Mr. Holtz taught himself Scheme and even hacked the game ' Star Wars Jedi Knight Dark Forces II '.

Mr. Holtz also likes science and has been conducting advanced scientific experiments himself since he was a child. At one point, he built his own wind tunnel and flew a paper airplane at 160 miles per hour (about 257.5 km). Also, by the age of 13, he received an award for presenting scientific research.



Mr. Holtz came up with the idea for Leap Motion when his teacher said, ``If you can write 60 words in a minute just by holding your hand over a piece of paper, you can do anything,'' in a typing class he took when he was a junior high school student. Then, when he was in high school, he started designing an algorithm to track hands using 3D modeling.

Mr. Holtz earned degrees in mathematics and physics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In graduate school, I worked in applied mathematics and also worked at NASA's Langley Research Institute and the Max Planck Institute, where I was involved in various research projects. Mr. Holtz set out to make Leap Motion a reality during his career as a researcher, and co-founded Leap Motion in 2008.



Leap Motion is an input device that reads hand movements in the air. If you read the article below, you will understand what kind of device Leap Motion actually is.

This is what it looks like when you actually use ``Leap Motion'', which allows you to operate a computer just by moving your hand in the air - GIGAZINE



``Leap Motin is the right product, but it was released at the wrong time,'' Holtz said, specifically arguing that it should have been released after the mainstream of smartphones became touchscreen-equipped. Masu. Leap Motion can track hand movements, making it highly compatible with VR (virtual reality) content, but Holtz himself believes that the potential of hand motion computing and VR is quite limited. .

Leap Motion, co-founded by Mr. Holtz, was approached by Apple in 2013 to acquire it for hundreds of millions of dollars (tens of billions of yen), but Mr. Holtz rejected this proposal. However, Leap Motion's corporate value subsequently declined, and Leap Motion was eventually sold to a British company in 2019 for $30 million (approximately 4.34 billion yen).

Since Mr. Holtz lived in San Francisco, he deepened his knowledge of AI by regularly attending parties attended by AI researchers. Mr. Holtz founded the AI company Midjourney in 2021 and developed Midjourney over nine months based on OpenAI's algorithm. Mr. Holtz describes Midjourney as ``a tool for people to create beautiful things,'' and that it becomes a ``vessel for the mind'' for users.

Midjourney will be released on a trial basis in 2022. Beta testing was conducted on Twitter (currently X) and the online chat tool Discord.



Holtz said that the official version of Midjourney should be rolled out entirely on Discord, after users enjoyed interacting with Midjourney's AI as if they were using a chatbot during a test run of Midjourney. I decided that it was. Although he was criticized by those around him, saying, ``It's crazy to roll out a product on Discord alone,'' Holtz said, ``Users like it (using Discord). Other than that, nothing else matters.'' is the answer.

Related Posts:

in Note,   Software,   Hardware, Posted by log1i_yk