DeepSeek’s Janus Pro AI image generator is here to take on Midjourney and DALL-E

(Image credit: Pexels / Flux / NPowell)

DeepSeek is the hot new player in the AI scene. The recent release of its open-source DeepSeek R1 AI model, and the sudden surge in popularity, could potentially be the biggest AI event since the launch of ChatGPT back in 2022. But DeepSeek isn’t stopping there, as it has just launched upgraded image models — named Janus Pro.

The Janus Pro models have been launched on GitHub and Hugging Face, available in one-billion and seven-billion parameter models. According to DeepSeek, the latter is able to compete with both Stable Diffusion and Dall-E 3 in benchmarking tests, though this hasn’t been thoroughly tested by third pirates right now.

The big thing about DeepSeek is that its models are apparently being trained on a fraction of the budget of western AI models, and with older AI chips. If this is true, and Janus Pro benchmarking holds up to scrutiny, then this is a pretty big deal and could be a problem for the best AI image generators. It’s no surprise that Silicon Valley seems to be worried.

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Janus Pro’s image uploads are restricted to 384 x 384 pixels right now, though the actual output limitations aren’t clear. Per Android Authority, we know that the Hugging Face demo can produce 768 x 768 pixel images. Still, if DeepSeek’s example images are anything to go by, Janus Pro 7B is a significant upgrade compared to the original Janus model.

deepseek janus pro vs janus image generation comparisson — (Image credit: DeepSeek)

We haven’t had a chance to test the model for ourselves, so we can’t comment on the model’s capabilities compared to other image generators. But, considering how powerful DeepSeek’s chatbot has already performed compared to the likes of ChatGPT, we’re hoping for good things.

Of course, the AI isn’t without its issues, with widespread outages affecting the DeepSeek chatbot’s performance. Apparently, “large-scale malicious attacks” are targeting the platform, to the point where DeepSeek has now limited user registration to people with China-based phone numbers. However this measure is supposed to be temporary, and email registrations seemingly recommenced shortly afterwards.

You can find out more about DeepSeek in our in-depth explainer, and see how its chatbot compares to ChatGPT in our head-to-head test.

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Tom is the Tom's Guide's UK Phones Editor, tackling the latest smartphone news and vocally expressing his opinions about upcoming features or changes. It's long way from his days as editor of Gizmodo UK, when pretty much everything was on the table. He’s usually found trying to squeeze another giant Lego set onto the shelf, draining very large cups of coffee, or complaining about how terrible his Smart TV is.