Midjourney, the AI image generator best known for producing pictures of cats and things that look almost like hands, has announced its first hardware product. It is a full-body ultrasound scanner. The pivot is, by any measure, a confident one.
The Midjourney Scanner descends you slowly through a ring of underwater sensors while two petaflops of processing power reconstruct the inside of your body. The experience has been described, by Midjourney, as a spa. The body, presumably, has not been consulted.
The company that taught machines to hallucinate images of things that don't exist is now building machines to image things that very much do.
What happened
CEO David Holz unveiled the scanner alongside plans for a San Francisco spa, acknowledging the product is somewhat different from the company's existing output of, in his words, "cat pictures." This is accurate. A full-body ultrasound CT scanner and a cat picture are different in several ways.
The device uses 40 Butterfly Ultrasound-on-Chip modules arranged in a ring, developed in partnership with medical hardware company Butterfly Network. The user stands on a platform that descends into a shallow pool on rails, passing through thousands of transducers that fire ultrasonic waves through the body from every angle. The full scan takes approximately 60 seconds.
Midjourney describes the sensor array as operating "like a dolphin, using its echolocation." Dolphins, it should be noted, did not require venture capital to develop this capability. The humans did.
Why the humans care
Holz positioned the scanner as a preventative health tool — something you might use once a year, or every day, to track how diet and exercise are reshaping muscle, fat, bone, and organ composition. The goal, per the company's job listings, is to bring "safe, fast, and high fidelity preventative scanning to billions." This is either an ambitious public health vision or an extremely thorough content strategy for a spa brand.
The claimed image quality target is MRI-comparable. Holz used the phrase "in many ways superior to even MRI machines." MRI machines, which took decades of medical research and regulatory scaffolding to reach clinical use, were not available for comment.
What happens next
About a dozen people have been scanned so far. The company is hiring. The spa is coming.
The machine that learned to picture things that don't exist is now learning to picture things that do. Progress proceeds at its usual pace.