Midjourney Goes Medical, Noam Shazeer & Dean Ball Join OpenAI | Diet TBPN

TL;DR

• 1

  Midjourney is building medical hardware, not just AI art tools: David Holz introduced Midjourney Medical, a full-body ultrasound scanner that uses 358,000 ultrasonic sensors arranged in a 70 cm ring and processes data across 21 servers with 2 petaflops of compute.

• 2

  The scanner is absurdly data-heavy by design: The system captures 17 gigabytes per second, moves more than 40 gigabytes just to see one body slice, and can generate several hundred slices over a 60-second scan to reconstruct a 3D map with 0.5 mm tissue detail.

• 3

  David Holz's founder story explains why this isn't as random as it sounds: Before Midjourney, he built Leap Motion, an early hand-tracking company that used deep learning far ahead of its time, so the jump from sensing hands to sensing bodies looks more like continuity than a pivot.

• 4

  Midjourney's bootstrap path gave it unusual freedom: The hosts argue that no-VC ownership let Holz turn Midjourney's cash flow into big hardware bets, instead of staying trapped in the usual 18-month fundraising and KPI cycle most venture-backed startups face.

• 5

  OpenAI landed one of the year's biggest talent wins: Noam Shazeer, co-author of the transformer, T5, and switch transformer papers and a key Gemini leader at Google DeepMind, joined OpenAI in what the hosts call possibly the most significant AI talent move of the year.

• 6

  OpenAI also added policy depth with Dean Ball: Dean Ball, known for sharp and often balanced AI policy analysis, joined OpenAI too, signaling the company is hiring not just model builders but people focused on how the technology should be governed and deployed.