Facing challenges from its self-developed AI models in competing with industry leaders, Meta Platforms, Inc. is adjusting its long-held internal development strategy and turning to partnerships with external AI companies.
On Friday, August 22, Meta's newly appointed Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang announced on social platform X that the company plans to engage in "technical cooperation" with AI image and video generation startup Midjourney, licensing its "aesthetic technology" to "bring beauty to billions of people."
Wang stated that to ensure Meta can deliver the best products, the company needs to adopt an "all-around" strategy, including partnerships with "the best players in the industry." This move marks a significant strategic shift for Meta in the AI field, from closed internal development to open collaboration, directly impacting its future ability to integrate AI-generated content into social applications.
This partnership comes against the backdrop that despite CEO Mark Zuckerberg investing billions of dollars in pursuing "superintelligence," Meta's AI products appear to have fallen behind competitors, with internal confidence in the self-developed Llama series models waning.
**Self-Developed Models Lag Behind, Strategic Focus Shifts**
The partnership with Midjourney highlights the challenges Meta faces in its AI self-development path.
Although Meta launched the image generation tool Imagine in 2024 and plans to fully integrate the video generation model Movie Gen into Instagram in 2025, industry insiders believe that compared to models like Google's Veo 3 and OpenAI's Sora, which have already been released to consumers, Meta's products "already appear outdated."
The deeper challenge lies in its foundational large language models. According to sources familiar with the matter, due to weakening confidence in its own Llama models, Meta has begun using third-party models internally for tasks such as coding.
Meanwhile, the company has abandoned plans to publicly release its flagship large language model Behemoth, instead focusing on developing new models. This series of actions indicates that Meta is shifting from a "do-everything-ourselves" philosophy to a more pragmatic approach combining internal and external strategies.
**Massive Investment Alongside Internal Turbulence**
Meta's strategic adjustment occurs against the backdrop of unprecedented investment in the AI field. In recent months, Zuckerberg has not only actively recruited top AI researchers from competitors but also doubled down on AI infrastructure investments, acquired AI voice company Play AI, and invested in data annotation company Scale AI.
However, massive investments have not immediately translated into stable organizational structures and leading products. Meta's AI division "Meta Superintelligence Lab" has reportedly undergone four reorganizations in the past six months, reflecting difficulties the company faces in establishing an effective organizational structure. This disparity between input and output may be the direct reason prompting Meta to seek external technical partnerships.
**The AI Newcomer's "Aesthetic Technology"**
The partnership's counterpart, Midjourney, is an AI image generation company founded in 2021. Its founder David Holz has insisted on not accepting venture capital, choosing to self-fund development, but this hasn't prevented it from becoming one of the most popular image generation tools.
For Meta, Midjourney's core value lies in its mature "aesthetic technology." In social media applications, the visual appeal of generated content is crucial. Through licensing partnerships, Meta can quickly enhance the quality of AI-generated content in its products, thereby catching up with competitors in user experience.
Midjourney founder David Holz also confirmed the partnership on X, emphasizing that the company remains "an independent, community-supported research lab with no investors," ensuring its independence in technical cooperation.