Earlier this week, a brand new generative AI picture startup referred to as Ideogram, based by former Google Mind researchers, launched with $16.5 million in seed funding led by a16z and Index Ventures.

One other picture generator? Don’t we now have sufficient to select from between Midjourney, OpenAI’s Dall-E 2, and Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion? Nicely, Ideogram has a significant promoting level, as it could have lastly solved an issue plaguing most different well-liked AI picture turbines thus far: dependable textual content era inside the picture, comparable to lettering on indicators and for firm logos.

The corporate provides a lot of preset picture era kinds on its net app at ideogram.ai, together with one labeled “typography,” which renders lettering in numerous colours, fonts, sizes and styling. Different preset kinds embrace 3D rendering, cinematic, portray, style, product, illustration, conceptual artwork, ukiyo-e and others. You may choose a number of kinds directly and apply all of them.

Ideogram is already accessible for signup in beta. And its Discord server and net app are already crammed with examples of individuals producing lettering and pictures with lettering which can be spectacular in comparison with the present state-of-the-art (although not at all times totally correct) choices.

Nevertheless, Ideogram additionally lacks among the different options accessible on rival picture turbines like zoom out/outpainting, and its outcomes have been much less constant in our exams. It even had problem rendering its personal identify, “Ideogram,” and was higher at rendering extra widespread phrases.

The corporate took the event of its launch and beta launch to subtly spotlight this characteristic with a put up on X (previously Twitter) together with its mission assertion, “assist folks grow to be extra inventive,” generated utilizing its software.

Different buyers in Ideogram embrace AIX Ventures, Golden Ventures, Two Small Fish Ventures, and business consultants Ryan Dahl, Anjney Midha, Raquel Urtasun, Jeff Dean, Sarah Guo, Pieter Abbeel, Mahyar Salek, Soleio, Tom Preston-Werner and Andrej Karpathy.

The Toronto-based startup has already earned shoutouts from fellow AI notables together with David Ha, founder of Sakana AI and Margaret Mitchell, each of whom additionally labored for Google.

H/T @hardmaru: A brand new startup based by former Imagen folks at Google Mind?. I am SUPER FASCINATED by this, because the “creativity” panorama in AI is one w so many paths ahead. Not to mention, there’s large threat of paths that DECREASE creativity. So curious what they’re as much as! https://t.co/hDlTQCAL2a

— MMitchell (@mmitchell_ai) August 23, 2023

Whereas it’s nonetheless early days for Ideogram, differentiating by providing a dependable typographic generator is a great transfer and should assist it enchantment to graphic designers or those that would in any other case have to rent them to create imagery with eye-catching textual content baked in.

And different AI picture turbines are persevering with so as to add new options, too. Simply this week, Midjourney launched its new “vary region” feature so as to add, take away, and subtract parts of generated imagery.

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