[CuriouslyC]

Midjourney basically used RLHF on their model, so they have a bit of a data moat in terms of human aesthetic preference, but DALL-E 3 isn't bad in terms of aesthetics and its prompt adherence is vastly superior so that preference moat might not save them. They'll need to improve prompt adherence quite a bit to stay relevant.

Data is the new oil in the age of AI. The companies that do well will have products that siphon context enriched user behavior, build a strong brand with user loyalty, and effectively capitalize on the collected data to automate some expensive task. These data collection apps will be designed to break down and gamify tasks in such a way as to maximize the training value of the resulting data stream.

For example, imagine an IDE with an integrated stack overflow type service, where people could do collaborative coding or request help and get answers inside the application. That would give edit-by-edit updates, console output, problems with solutions and user solution preference. The company that owned that data would have a huge leg up on the competition in terms of creating AI software generation tools.