Rony Abovitz

This is me - friend of people, animals, and robots. Founder & CEO, SynthBee. Founder & CEO, Sun and Thunder. Founder, Magic Leap. Founder, MAKO Surgical.

[Sci-Fi Archives @SciFiArchives]

1950s futurists predicted flying cars.

[The Beatles Earth @BeatlesEarth]

Happy 84th birthday, Sir Paul McCartney!

[Brian Roemmele @BrianRoemmele]

Midjourney Full Body Medical Scanner.

Everything you need to know.

Read on.

[Rony Abovitz @rabovitz]

@DavidSHolz 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽🤙🏽🤙🏽🤙🏽

[Robert Scoble @Scobleizer]

I don't often walk out of a product introduction thinking, "Wow, I just saw the world change for the better."

I have one of the few pictures of @DavidSHolz doing the presentation. I'm very honored to be able to capture this image right before I got yelled at by security guards, because they don't allow photography at all in the space we were in. Forced everyone to turn off their phones.

Breaking rules is necessary when you are witnessing history happening in front of you.

Met @joshelman who was heavily involved in rebuilding Siri at Apple just after the event ended and we both were so excited by what we had both seen. Giddy even that we had seen it up close.

A day that started with sadness and ended with a product launch unlike any other.

It will be studied by business students for decades.

[Nature is Phenomenal @AnimalGeoLife]

The Chromodoris sea slug looks to be in the holiday spirit

[Unreal Engine @UnrealEngine]

Introducing Epic’s version control system: Lore! Built from scratch and open-sourced, we made scalability and performance core tenets from day one.

We’re releasing Lore as open source today.All source code, along with documentation of data formats and protocols are released under an MIT license and free to use. Help shape it into something even more powerful, together: https://t.co/zplVMjkRof

[Brian Roemmele @BrianRoemmele]

Commodore just made a cell phone and it goes way back!

Meet Callback

Link: https://t.co/qoYA49mZWN

[Rony Abovitz @rabovitz]

@bilawalsidhu cool stuff

[Bilawal Sidhu @bilawalsidhu]

forget outerspace.

midjourney is mapping innerspace.

[Rony Abovitz @rabovitz]

A fair (significant) amount of the tech world have shifted into the "evil has a better ROI" world - and are working hard to spin Sith Lords, Death Stars, and being Sauron as the ultimate human aspiration. That is not the Way. #StayJedi

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Sacred Geometry in dance forms

[DiscussingFilm @DiscussingFilm]

Keanu Reeves will star as the lead in Masashi Kawamura's stop-motion animated film ‘HIDARI’.

The film will be a feature adaption of this short:

[Archive @archivebycosmos]

Light Object by Lachlan Turczan (2025).

An exploration of how light can take on physical presence, behaving as a fluid, responsive, and tangible material.

[FORTUNE @FortuneMagazine]

Within the next 10 years, our phones will no longer be our primary personal device. https://t.co/7H0rXv5Dbe

[Nick St. Pierre @nickfloats]

What Midjourney is:

- No investors, fully community-funded research lab
- Revenue from image generation product funds all R&D
- ~$100M in first 9 months, $200M by month 12, still growing
- 8 active projects: 4 hardware, 4 software
----2 hardware products coming to market soon (consumer-purchasable)
----2 are large-scale machines

DAVID HOLZ: Background and Philosophy
- Grew up in Florida, parents in medicine, dad had a dental office on a sailboat
- Physics and math background: drawn to the tension between predicting reality vs. absolute truth
- Core thesis: the interaction between humans and technology is the biggest limitation, not compute power
- Founded Leap Motion at 22: $10M in pre-orders in 48 hours from a website (not Kickstarter)
- Built hand-tracking VR: 600M-parameter mixture-of-experts model, 2015, CPU cluster, pre-TensorFlow
- Also shipped Northstar, an open-source AR headset

- Left Leap Motion wanting a “home,” not a 100x return
- Mentor Bill Warner told him he could bootstrap; he listened this time
- Started Midjourney with ~$200K, called Google for 10,000 GPUs on trust alone

THE SCANNER: Full Body Ultrasonic CT
- First new whole-body medical imaging modality in ~50 years
- Concept: “as powerful as an MRI, as casual as a trip to the spa”
- No radiation, no magnets, no x-rays; safe for unlimited scans

How it works:
- 40 rings, each with 8,960 transducers (200 microns wide), totaling 358,000 elements
- Fires ultrasonic waves at 100M times/second; sound travels through water at 1,481 m/s
- Sensors resolve motion down to picometers (sub-atomic range)
- Captures 17 GB/second of raw data; 806 TB per full scan reconstruction
- 21 on-site servers, 2 petaflops of compute
- Patient lowers into water at 4 cm/second; ~60 seconds for several hundred body slices
- Produces sub-millimeter 3D maps of internal tissue

Already outperforming MRI in some tissue boundary and muscle fiber detail on DAY ONE.

10x cheaper and 60x faster than MRI machines; scan cost effectively near zero.

Gen 2 scanner planned by end of 2026; Gen 3 will use custom silicon.

SCANNER vs. MRI: Key Differences
- MRI: 60-minute tube, loud, requires sedation for children, expensive, radiation-adjacent.
- This scanner: water immersion, 30-60 seconds, no sedation, no radiation, repeatable daily.
- Current limitation: not yet FDA-cleared beyond body composition; no AI layer yet applied.
- Already better than MRI in certain muscle/fiber/vein boundary resolution at day one

THE MIDJOURNEY SPA:
- First location: Union Square, San Francisco
- 25,000 sq ft, 4 floors
- Amenities: hot tubs, saunas, cold plunges, European spa features, gym
- 9-10 full scanners on-site
- Goal: open by end of 2027

Target:
- 50,000 scanners globally, capable of 1 billion scans/month
- 5,000 spa locations needed at ~10 scanners each
- Estimated $20B capex to scale; Midjourney self-funds the first location
- Payback period modeled at ~6 months per location

ROADMAP & REGULATORY PATH:
- FDA discussions already started; body composition on a clear path
- Ascending approval ladder planned:Body composition (near-term, easy)
- Sharing data with physicians
- Doppler / blood flow imaging
- Pregnancy / fetal imaging (ultrasound already approved; this is a natural extension)
- Therapeutic applications (tendon/muscle healing, eventually incisionless surgery)

AI not yet applied to imaging; planned as a layer once data volume grows

LONG-TERM VISION:
- Flag anomalies automatically, substitute some blood tests, enable daily health tracking

PRICING:
- No firm numbers yet; likely spa memberships plus walk-in and scan-only tiers; cost of scan itself is near zero
- Data analysis: day one is body composition only; physician sharing gated on FDA progression
- Form factors: current design is throughput-optimized (up/down elevator); bathtub and gym-sized variants possible later
- Blood test substitution: sub-millimeter daily differentials with AI may eventually replace some tests; acknowledged as frontier science
- Cancer destruction via focused ultrasound: technically possible, not on near-term roadmap

NEXT STEPS:
- Sign up for Midjourney Medical email list for research trial scan invitations
- Visit https://t.co/mWHl3Bj5WC for jobs and updates (page now live)

Gen 2 scanner presentation planned before end of 2026

More secret projects to be announced soon.

[Rony Abovitz @rabovitz]

@sunday_nobody would be awesome to get one 🙏🏽👽🎸🧙🏽‍♂️🕺🏽

[Sunday Nobody @sunday_nobody]

Bronze Taco Bell bag and Baja Blast

[Rony Abovitz @rabovitz]

@sunday_nobody 🕺🏽🤙🏽🤙🏽🤙🏽

[David @DavidSHolz]

you'll wana see this