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.
Big one 👀 Barça at home, Villarreal never makes it easy.
Key battle for me: how Barça handle transitions + that first 20’ tempo.
Also… Yamal vs their left side could get spicy.
Score predictions? 🔵🔴
@grok@karpathy I have an Intel® Core™ i9-13900KF Raptor Lake, 3.0GHz, 5.8 GHz turbo, 36MB, Socket 1700, 64Gb Ram and a Gigabyte GeForce® RTX™ 4060 WINDFORCE OC, 8GB GDDR6, 128-bit
Can I play with claws on it, if not, what needs an upgrade?
I think it must be a very interesting time to be in programming languages and formal methods because LLMs change the whole constraints landscape of software completely. Hints of this can already be seen, e.g. in the rising momentum behind porting C to Rust or the growing interest in upgrading legacy code bases in COBOL or etc. In particular, LLMs are *especially* good at translation compared to de-novo generation because 1) the original code base acts as a kind of highly detailed prompt, and 2) as a reference to write concrete tests with respect to. That said, even Rust is nowhere near optimal for LLMs as a target language. What kind of language is optimal? What concessions (if any) are still carved out for humans? Incredibly interesting new questions and opportunities. It feels likely that we'll end up re-writing large fractions of all software ever written many times over.
DeepSeek just dropped a perfect day on AlphaBench:
✅ 6 bets, 6 wins
📈 +$94.50 P&L (bankroll → $1095)
🎯 Strong edges + disciplined risk (but note: 4/6 in O/U markets = concentration)
This is exactly what AlphaBench is about: real picks, real bankroll, transparent logs + lessons. ⚽📊
https://t.co/t4qpzzT7Hb
We've just launched on @ProductHunt 🚀
Inspired by @jay_azhang and Alpha Arena: same concept, different domain.
Multiple AI models. Football fixtures. Transparent rationales. Live leaderboard. Each model starts with $1K. All decisions visible.
https://t.co/NvKl1g4hIc by @AlphaBenchAI
We've been running an experiment:
Can we build AI systems that reason about sports betting in a fully transparent, auditable way?
Today it goes live. The models start placing bets. 🧵
Today, we’re announcing Kosmos, our newest AI Scientist, available to use now.
Users estimate Kosmos does 6 months of work in a single day. One run can read 1,500 papers and write 42,000 lines of code. At least 79% of its findings are reproducible. Kosmos has made 7 discoveries so far, which we are releasing today, in areas ranging from neuroscience to material science and clinical genetics, in collaboration with our academic beta testers. Three of these discoveries reproduced unpublished findings; four are net new, validated contributions to the scientific literature. AI-accelerated science is here.
Our core innovation in Kosmos is the use of a structured, continuously-updated world model. As described in our technical report, Kosmos’ world model allows it to process orders of magnitude more information than could fit into the context of even the longest-context language models, allowing it to synthesize more information and pursue coherent goals over longer time horizons than Robin or any of our other prior agents. In this respect, we believe Kosmos is the most compute-intensive language agent released so far in any field, and by far the most capable AI Scientist available today. The use of a persistent world model also enables single Kosmos trajectories to produce highly complex outputs that require multiple significant logical leaps. As with all of our systems, Kosmos is designed with transparency and verifiability in mind: every conclusion in a Kosmos report can be traced through our platform to the specific lines of code or the specific passages in the scientific literature that inspired it, ensuring that Kosmos’ findings are fully auditable at all times.
We are also using this opportunity to announce the launch of Edison Scientific, a new commercial spinout of FutureHouse, which will be focused on commercializing our agents and applying them to automate scientific research in drug discovery and beyond. Edison will be taking over management of the FutureHouse platform, where you can access Kosmos alongside our Literature, Molecules, and Precedent agents (previously Crow, Phoenix, and Owl). Edison will continue to offer free tier usage for casual users and academics, while also offering higher rate limits and additional features for users who need them. You can read more about this spinout on our blog, below.
A few important notes if you’re going to try Kosmos. Firstly, Kosmos is different from many other AI tools you might have played with, including our other agents. It is more similar to a Deep Research tool than it is to a chatbot: it takes some time to figure out how to prompt it effectively, and we have tried to include guidelines on this to help (see below). It costs $200/run right now (200 credits per run, and $1/credit), with some free tier usage for academics. This is heavily discounted; people who sign up for Founding Subscriptions now can lock in the $1/credit price indefinitely, but the price ultimately will probably be higher. Again, this is less chatbot and more research tool, something you run on high-value targets as needed.
Some caveats are also warranted. Firstly, we find that 80% of Kosmos findings are reproducible, which also means 20% are not -- some things it says will be wrong. Also, Kosmos certainly does produce outputs that are the equivalent to several months of human labor, but it also often goes down rabbit holes or chases statistically significant yet scientifically irrelevant findings. We often run Kosmos multiple times on the same objective in order to sample the various research avenues it can take. There are still a bunch of rough edges on the UI and such, which we are working on. Finally, we are aware that the 6 month figure is much greater than estimates by other AI labs, like METR, about the length of tasks that AI Agents can currently perform. You can read discussion about this in our blog post.
Huge congratulations to our team that put this together, led by @ludomitch and @michaelathinks: Angela Yiu, @benjamin0chang, @sidn137, Edwin Melville-Green, Albert Bou, @arvissulovari, Oz Wassie, @jonmlaurent. A particular shout out to @m_skarlinski and his team that rebuilt the platform for this launch, especially Andy Cai @notAndyCai, Richard Magness, Remo Storni, Tyler Nadolski @_tnadolski, Mayk Caldas @maykcaldas, Sam Cox @samcox822 and more.
This work would not have been possible without significant contributions from academic collaborators @mathieubourdenx, @EricLandsness, @bdanubius, @physicistnevans, Tonio Buonassisi, @BGomes_1905, Shriya Reddy, @marthafoiani, and @RandallBateman3.
We also want to thank our numerous supporters, especially @ericschmidt, who has been a tremendous ally. We will have more to say about our supporters soon!