[gwern]

Have you looked at https://www.recraft.ai/ recently? The image quality of their vector outputs seems to have gotten quite good, although you obviously still wouldn't want to try to generate densely textured or photographic-like images like Midjourney excels at. (For https://gwern.net/dropcap last year or before, we had to settle for Midjourney and create a somewhat convoluted workflow through Recraft; but if I were making dropcaps now, I think the latest Recraft model would probably suffice.)

[esperent]

Link to their vector page, since the main page makes them look like yet another AI image generator:

https://www.recraft.ai/ai-image-vectorizer

The quality does look quite amazing at first glance. How are the vectors to work with? Can you just open them in illustrator and start editing?

[gwern]

No, I actually was referring to their native vector AI image generator, not their vectorizer - although the vectorizer was better than any other we found, and that's why we were using it to convert the Midjourney PNG dropcaps into SVGs

(The editing quality of the vectorized ones were not great, but it is hard to see how they could be good given their raster-style appearance. I can't speak to the editing quality of the native-generated ones, either in the old obsolete Recraft models or the newer ones, because the old ones were too ugly to want to use, and I haven't done much with the new one yet.)

[brown_martin]

I was under the impression that their AI Vector generator generates a PNG and vectorizes under the hood.

[gwern]

Hm... I was definitely under the impression that it is generating SVGs natively, and that was consistent with its output and its recent upgrades like good text rendering, and I'm fairly sure I've said as much to the CEO and not been corrected... But I don't offhand recollect a specific reference where they say unambiguously that it's a SVG generator rather than vectorizer(raster), so maybe I'm wrong about that.

[brown_martin]

For me its based on that vector generation is much harder than raster, recraft has raised just over $10M (not that much in this space), and their api has no direct vector generation.