Ideogram 2.0 has arrived to eat Midjourney’s lunch

By Andrew Tarantola Published August 22, 2024

The AI image generation wars are heating up. Just as Google has released its own Pixel Studio generator to disastrous results, AI startup Ideogram announced Wednesday on X (formerly Twitter) has announced the second version release of its product with the same name, Ideogram 2.0.

In addition to increasing its model’s new creative capabilities, the company also says it’s rolling out an iOS app, an API, and a visual search system. The announcement comes after a big week in AI image generation, with the launch of Grok-2 and a significant Midjourney update.

Introducing Ideogram 2.0 — our most advanced text-to-image model, now available to all users for free.

Today’s milestone launch also includes the release of the Ideogram iOS app, the beta version of the Ideogram API, and Ideogram Search.

Here’s what’s new… 🧵 pic.twitter.com/nvD0ogRh2J

— Ideogram (@ideogram_ai) August 21, 2024

Ideogram 2.0 enables users to generate images in one of five distinct styles: General, Realistic, Design, 3D, and Anime. General, which you can see from the horse-sized ducks fighting duck-sized horses below, will give you a basic illustration based on your prompt.

Realistic style produces closer to photographic-quality images, down to the correct number of eyes and fingers, er, feathers.

Design offers improved text rendering and allows users to overlay an image with specific color schemes and pallets, making it a useful tool in rapidly iterating logos and graphics.

3D style will return, you guessed it, a 3D rendered image that, in this duck’s case, somehow looks more lifelike than the Realistic style, while Anime does exactly what you think it does.

The company also announced the release of its Ideogram Search engine, which will enable users to more efficiently search for inspiration amid Ideogram’s billion-plus public images, an iOS app, as well as the beta release of its API.

The API will “offer superior image quality at a lower cost compared to other models,” the company claimed in a follow-up tweet. Ideogram is currently charging between .01 and .08 cent per input, depending on the model used and function.

For consumers, Ideogram offers a range of subscriptions. The free tier is surprisingly generous, allowing you to generate around 40 images a day at no charge.

For $7/month, the Basic plan offers 400 priority generation credits a month and 100 slow credits per day, as well as other benefits like full-quality image downloads. For $16/month Plus grants 1,000 priority credits and unlimited slow credits per month, and the $48/month Pro plan increases that figure to 4,000 fast credits (around 12,000 images) per month.