I'm a cardiologist. Something just happened today that I genuinely did not see coming — and it could change the future of preventive medicine more than anything I've written about on this platform.
Midjourney — the AI company that became famous for generating images from text prompts — just announced a medical hardware division and unveiled a working prototype of a full-body scanner unlike anything that's ever existed.
It's called the Midjourney Scanner. And it works like this.
You step into a shallow pool of water. You stand on a platform that slowly descends — about two inches per second — through a ring containing roughly half a million tiny ultrasonic transducers, each the size of a grain of sand. Every one of them acts as both a speaker and a microphone, sending ultrasonic waves through your body from every angle and recording what comes back.
60 seconds later, you step out. The scan is done.
No radiation. No magnets. No claustrophobia. No IV contrast. Just sound, water, and an almost incomprehensible amount of computing power — roughly 2 petaflops processing 17 gigabytes per second of raw acoustic data — reconstructing a 3D map of your entire internal anatomy down to half a millimeter resolution.
Organs. Tissues. Blood vessels. Bones. Muscle. Fat distribution. All segmented by AI in real time.
As a cardiologist who has spent months writing about how the standard screening playbook misses the majority of future heart attacks — this is the technology I've been waiting for without knowing it existed.
Here's why this matters for the future of your heart.
Right now, getting a detailed look inside your cardiovascular system requires either a CT scan (radiation), an MRI (magnets, claustrophobia, 45-60 minutes, $1,000+), or a coronary CT angiogram (radiation, IV contrast, limited availability). These are powerful tools. I order them regularly and they save lives.
But they're reactive. You get them when something is already suspected. They're expensive. They're uncomfortable. And for most people, they happen once — maybe twice — in a lifetime.
Imagine instead: a 60-second scan with no radiation that you could repeat monthly or quarterly. Tracking cardiac structure over time. Watching body composition shift. Detecting changes in organ size, fluid distribution, or vascular architecture before symptoms ever develop. Building a longitudinal dataset of YOUR body that AI can analyze for patterns no single snapshot would reveal.
That's what Midjourney is building toward.
The company plans 50,000 scanners worldwide over six years, with capacity for a billion scans per month. The first location — the "Midjourney Spa" in San Francisco — opens at the end of 2027 with 10 scanners alongside saunas, cold plunges, and a gym. The scan costs a few dollars. The experience is designed to feel like wellness, not medicine.
The technology is built on Butterfly Network's ultrasound-on-chip platform — 40 modules per scanner — combined with Midjourney's own AI segmentation and reconstruction stack. David Holz, the founder, claims the system aims for image quality comparable to MRI in many aspects but at nearly 100x the speed with zero radiation.
Now the caveats — because I'm a physician and the caveats matter enormously.
This is a Gen 1 prototype. About a dozen people have been scanned so far. Current scan time is actually closer to 20 minutes, not 60 seconds — the system is bottlenecked by bandwidth and reconstruction algorithms. The 60-second target is aspirational for future hardware generations.
It is not FDA-cleared for diagnostic use. Midjourney is starting with body composition maps — a category below diagnostic imaging in the regulatory hierarchy. The path from "beautiful 3D body scans" to "clinically validated diagnostic tool that your cardiologist can act on" runs through years of clinical trials, comparative studies against MRI and CT gold standards, and FDA review.
No independent clinical validation has been published. The imaging claims come from Midjourney's own demonstrations. Comparative data against established modalities does not yet exist.
And the privacy implications of full-body internal scans at planetary scale — a billion scans per month — is a conversation that hasn't even started yet.
So I want to be precise. This is not ready for clinical medicine today. It may not be ready for years. Many ambitious medical hardware projects have failed in the gap between prototype and product.
But.
The fact that a working prototype exists — producing real segmented 3D anatomy from sound waves and compute alone — means the physics works. The engineering works. The question is no longer "is this possible" but "how fast can it be validated and scaled."
And if it is validated — if the resolution holds up against MRI, if the AI segmentation proves reliable, if the regulatory path clears — then what we're looking at is the most significant new imaging modality in 50 years.
For my entire career, preventive cardiology has been limited by the fact that seeing inside the body is expensive, slow, uncomfortable, and infrequent. We catch disease late because we image rarely. We image rarely because imaging is hard.
A 60-second, no-radiation, spa-based full-body scan that costs a few dollars would demolish every one of those barriers.
I've written about AI detecting inflamed arteries. About gene editing curing cholesterol. About GLP-1 drugs rewriting metabolic medicine. About cellular reprogramming reversing aging.
This is the missing piece: the ability to see inside every human body, routinely, safely, and affordably — so all of those interventions can be deployed before the disease arrives instead of after.
The company that taught AI to generate images from imagination just built a machine that generates images from the human body.
The future of medicine showed up today from the last place anyone expected.
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Lovable 的设计负责人 Felix Haas 在社交媒体上分享了一篇关于"AI 时代高效团队"的观察,七条经验总结,来自这家增长速度惊人的 AI 创业公司内部视角。
几条有意思的观点:
第一,别像员工一样等安排。影响力最大的人不问"这归谁管",看到问题直接上手。主人翁意识不是靠分配的,只能靠自己拿。
第二,招人看态度不看简历。技能当然重要,但光有技能几乎不能预测一个人能不能成事。真正跑出来的人靠的是好奇心、韧劲和学什么都愿意学的心态。在 AI 时代,这一点比过去更明显。
第三,好奇心和沉迷 AI 是两回事。真正用好 AI 的人不是天天刷资讯,而是不断去试那些没人让他试的东西,追那些可能根本走不通的想法。大多数人不会这么做,但少数坚持的人,回报是指数级的。
第四,让资深的人重新动手。这是 Haas 觉得最有意思的现象:经验丰富的管理者重新变成了 builder(建造者)。AI 让个体贡献者的杠杆效应急剧放大,一个深度使用 AI 的资深工程师或设计师,可能是当下公司里最强大的组合。
第五,自我意识是速度的敌人。Haas 说他从没见过自我意识让公司变快,但见过它让公司变慢。最快的团队不太在意谁拿功劳,只在意什么方案有效。
第六,先发布再迭代。一周的内部讨论,抵不上一天的真实用户反馈。最强的团队不追求发布前完美,而是追求尽快学到东西。发布本身就是他们学习的方式。
这些观点单独看并不新鲜,不过 Lovable 这两年发展的确实不错,2024 年上线,8 个月做到 1 亿美元年收入,2025 年底完成 3.3 亿美元 B 轮融资,估值 66 亿美元,是欧洲增长最快的 AI 公司之一。
尤其是“让资深的人重新动手”这一条,可能是 AI 时代最容易被忽视的组织变化。当 AI 工具足够强大,过去被提拔到管理岗、远离一线的高手,重新获得了亲手做事的能力和动力。
Karpathy said something you'll regret ignoring:
"Remove yourself as the bottleneck. Maximize your leverage. Put in very few tokens, and a huge amount of stuff happens on your behalf."
Loop engineering is the exact thing that does that.
In a hand-run session, the operator handles two things:
- deciding what the agent runs next
- and checking its output before the next step
Both are manual, and both decide how far the agent gets on its own without the operator.
Loop engineering moves both steps into the system.
A core operating structure surrounds the loop, and the diagram below depicts it.
- A schedule decides what to run
- Loop is the maker that produces the work
- A separate checker agent grades the output
- A file on disk holds the state they both read.
The loop runs until either done, max iterations, or an exhausted budget.
Here are some practical engineering considerations:
1) A model grading its own output justifies what it already did instead of catching where it failed.
That's why a separate checker's findings return to the maker as the next instruction. And the cycle repeats until the checker finds nothing left to fix.
2) A loop with no stop condition burns tokens, and the cost climbs fast once sub-agents and long runs add up.
That's why the exit must be set before the loop runs, not while it is running.
A simple exit could be:
↳ fix only the major issues, run one final pass, and stop after two loops, with "all tests pass and lint clean" as the rule that ends it.
3) State has to live on disk, not in context.
The model forgets everything between runs, so an MD file or a knowledge graph holds what is done and what is still open.
Each run reads it and writes back to it, which lets a loop pick up again after days.
4) The lower the verification bar, the safer the loop.
Boring, repetitive checks like a stale version string or a missing test are trivial to verify, so a loop runs them with little risk while the operator is away.
Judgment-heavy work is loopable too, but only as far as the checker can confirm the result.
Let's look at how an unattended loop fails in two ways.
1) It reports done when nothing is actually verified.
The separate checker exists to prevent it, but it merges code faster than anyone reads it, so over weeks, the team stops understanding its own codebase while every check stays green.
Green tests say the code passed the tests, not that anyone knows what shipped. Someone still has to read what the loop merges.
2) The checker keeps a running loop honest, but it only catches failures inside a run.
The harness around the loop, like the prompts, tools, and checks wrapped around the model, still drifts and breaks in production as models change.
That repair loop is usually run by hand based on observability traces.
My co-founder wrote a detailed walkthrough (with code) on making that harness repair itself, where a failing trace gets diagnosed, the fix is verified against the exact input that failed, and the failure is locked as a regression test so it cannot recur.
Read it below.
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Live from the last Anthropic stage in Japan. Unpublished.