Midjourney hires Apple Vision Pro’s engineer as head of hardware

Midjourney, a generative AI startup, has hired Ahmad Abbas, a developer who worked for Apple for five years.

Ahmad Abbas has been with Midjourney for three months already. An interesting career change was spotted by tech pundits on X.

“My best guess is that they are thinking about generating full synthetic worlds for AR/VR because of their rumored works on text-to-3D,’ Jim Fan, NVIDIA’s Senior Research Scientist and Lead of AI Agents, recently tweeted.

As per Abbas’ LinkedIn page, he worked for Apple for five years, focusing on the Apple Vision Pro for over three years. Other notable career choices include Musk’s Neuralink, where Abbas spent nine months working with hardware design, and Leap Motion, famous for its hand-tracking camera.

Since December, Abbas has been the Head of Hardware at Midjourney. According to the company’s page, it has only 11 full-time employees. Its CEO is David Holz, who co-founded Leap Motion in 2010 – a company that was reportedly almost purchased by Apple.

While Midjourney is now best known as an art generator, the recent hire incites further discussions about Midjourney as a hardware company.

“In office hours yesterday they mentioned a newly formed hardware team that is currently focused on collecting data for 3D,” Nick St. Pierre, a creative director exploring AI and X influencer, tweeted in January.

‘But in the future, they said they may enter the realm of personal computing, a device that enables anyone to organize and manage tens of thousands of virtual 3D spaces. It was described as an "orb," they added.