My guess is that MidJourney has been doing a massive-scale reinforcement learning from human feedback ("RLHF") - possibly the largest ever for text-to-image.
When human users choose to upscale an image, it's because they prefer it over the alternatives. It'd be a huge waste not to use this as a reward signal - cheap to collect, and exactly aligned with what your user base wants.
The more users you have, the better RLHF you can do. And then the more users you gain.
— Jim Fan
Recent articles
- ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages, and download files - 26th January 2026
- Wilson Lin on FastRender: a browser built by thousands of parallel agents - 23rd January 2026
- First impressions of Claude Cowork, Anthropic's general agent - 12th January 2026