Janus-Pro-7B – DeepSeek’s revolutionary AI image generator appears – what is it and should the likes of Midjourney be concerned by this Chinese Sputnik moment?
“Float like a butterfly and sting like a bee,” is the legendary quote from Muhammed Ali when describing how he took down his opponents. Chinese AI start-up, or better yet upstart AI company that has literally stunned the world has gone more for the Mike Tyson approach of smashing your foe’s face in. In this latest move today, it may even be trying to bite the ear off American AI tech bros. Interesting times indeed.
Yesterday , we extensively covered whether DeepSeek was safe, how to install it on your own PC as well as carry it around in your pocket, and just generally marvelled alongside everybody else at the achievement.
The arrival of DeepSeek is being touted as China’s Sputnik moment – the moment the USA realised that while it thought it was the top of the tree, there was actually a bigger Russian tree and it was launching all sorts into space.
Now if DeepSeek has sat the likes of NVidia and OpenAI down on the canvas, another flurry of punches took aim at the likes of Dall-e, Midjourney and Ideogram. Janus-Pro-7B, a cutting-edge AI image generation model is the new kid on the block and not only is it super-impressive, it is riding on the back off all the publicity of the DeepSeek LLM.
Now we haven’t been playing with Janus for long but the fact that is a free thing is going to add yet more concern for America’s tech companies, who are, this morning no doubt, desperate to find the new Neil Armstrong to lead the charge to the moon.
You can run Janus via Hugging Face, or, like DeepSeek, install it locally a la Stable Diffusion. Running it on Hugging Face is janky right now because the servers are getting hit hard but we still got the above robot dog out of it and as you can see from the below tweet, Janus seems to know what it is doing.
Just tried to generate an image of a bird that looks like a tennis ball with Deepseek's new Janus-Pro-7B model, here's what it came up with https://t.co/ZIHEAIj1p2 pic.twitter.com/qvdDgflAfB
— Alex (@avrecum) January 27, 2025
At this stage it has a long way to go to catch up with the teams that have been doing this for a few years although it is already surpassing them in several benchmarks, but things move fast in this game and once again, if Janus can be proved to be much cheaper to operate than all the others, well, you might wish you had sold all those Nvidia shares last week.
Featured image: AI generated by Janus-Pro-7B
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