Midjourney has a new side quest... death

[00:00] Last week, David Holz, the founder of

[00:02] Midjourney, the company best known for

[00:04] generating six-fingered anime waifus and

[00:06] getting sued by Disney, sat on stage and

[00:08] announced their next big initiative to

[00:10] get inside of you. Midjourney Medical is

[00:13] a new division of Midjourney with the

[00:14] goal to reimagine the foundations of

[00:17] healthcare and our relationships to our

[00:18] bodies. The last time a San Francisco

[00:20] company wanted to reimagine the

[00:22] relationship with my body, I ended up

[00:24] getting Narcan behind the Ben & Jerry's

[00:26] at Fisherman's Wharf, but they said you

[00:27] can't OD on the same thing twice, so I'm

[00:30] feeling optimistic. David went on to

[00:32] basically say that because Midjourney is

[00:34] bootstrapped and profitable, they can

[00:36] afford to focus on something no other

[00:37] frontier AI lab would touch with a 10-ft

[00:39] pole, and that is actually improving the

[00:41] human experience. In today's video,

[00:43] we'll look at how they plan on doing

[00:45] that, what it may mean for the future of

[00:47] healthcare, and why I now know that I

[00:48] have the bone density of a Civil War

[00:50] widow. It is June 23rd, 2026, and you're

[00:53] watching The Code Report. In today's

[00:55] [music] world, if you want to look

[00:56] inside yourself, you have a few options

[00:58] that were all invented before the

[00:59] personal computer. You've got an MRI

[01:01] machine, which feels like sitting inside

[01:03] a Titan submersible as it screams at you

[01:05] for an hour, or you can do a CT scan,

[01:07] which is much faster, but with that

[01:09] speed comes a microdose of radiation.

[01:11] There's also a Dexa scan, which is more

[01:13] convenient, but causes depression when

[01:15] you get the results and realize that

[01:16] veggie straws don't actually contain any

[01:18] vegetables in them. All three are

[01:20] expensive at best and locked behind the

[01:22] bureaucracy of the healthcare system at

[01:23] worst. Not to mention, the whole

[01:25] industry is gated behind referrals,

[01:27] insurance fights, and wait times that

[01:29] give that pesky lump in your pants time

[01:31] to grow. That's why Midjourney got my

[01:33] attention last week when they announced

[01:34] their goal is to make a medical imaging

[01:37] device called ultrasonic CT that's

[01:39] cheap, fast, and accessible. It works by

[01:42] having you step into a platform and

[01:44] slowly lowers you into a shallow pool of

[01:46] warm water. As you sink, you pass

[01:48] through a ring of half a million tiny

[01:50] sensors that are each about the size of

[01:52] a grain of sand equipped with a

[01:53] microscopic speaker and microphone that

[01:56] fires ultrasonic waves through your body

[01:58] at a million times per second. When the

[02:00] waves come back, depending on what they

[02:02] pass through, they come back in

[02:03] different shapes. This creates terabytes

[02:05] of data per second about your insides,

[02:07] but reconstructing a coherent image from

[02:10] ambiguous noisy input is ironically the

[02:12] one thing Midjourney has spent years

[02:14] perfecting. The end result looks a lot

[02:16] like what you get with today's MRIs, but

[02:18] at nearly 100 times the speed and

[02:20] without having to marinate in the

[02:22] screaming tube. Because this whole

[02:23] process is just sound waves, some water,

[02:26] and eventually a minute of your time,

[02:28] Midjourney believes getting scanned

[02:29] should be much more common than it is

[02:31] today. But to do that, it needs to be

[02:33] available in a place you actually want

[02:34] to visit. And as Robert Kraft once told

[02:36] me, there's no better place than a spa.

[02:38] So they're also launching Midjourney

[02:40] Spa, a 25,000 square foot space in San

[02:43] Francisco at the end of 2027, complete

[02:46] with hot tubs, saunas, cold plunges, and

[02:49] in their words, cozy rooms of pools of

[02:51] golden light which softly scan your

[02:53] body. The pitch is that you show up for

[02:55] a relaxing day, dip into some water,

[02:57] maybe turn down some LSD from an early

[02:59] FTX employee, and the full body scan

[03:01] just sort of happens as a side effect.

[03:03] But before you get too excited about

[03:05] cold plunging with Linux kernel

[03:06] maintainers, there are some people who

[03:08] have doubts, and they happen to be

[03:09] doctors. The biggest critique is that

[03:11] ultrasound is great at soft squishy

[03:13] stuff near the surface, like your

[03:15] thyroid, kidneys, or abdomen, but the

[03:17] laws of physics prevent sound waves from

[03:19] traveling through air or bone, which

[03:21] means your air-filled lungs and your

[03:23] skull-wrapped brain are basically

[03:25] invisible to it. And clever vibe-coded

[03:27] software is never going to fix that.

[03:29] It's also extremely early. That

[03:31] 60-second scan is a goalpost, but today

[03:33] the prototype takes about 20 minutes to

[03:35] finish and has no FDA clearance. So for

[03:38] now, the only thing it's legally allowed

[03:40] to tell you is your body composition,

[03:42] which if you're watching this, I could

[03:43] probably tell you as well. So the

[03:45] current plan is that over the next year,

[03:47] they'll be refining the hardware,

[03:49] running research trials, and building

[03:50] out the first research spa before it

[03:53] opens at the end of 2027. In the

[03:55] meantime, they'll keep submitting test

[03:56] results to the FDA to slowly unlock the

[03:59] actual disease detecting stuff, build

[04:01] out Gen 3 of their scanner, which they

[04:03] hope to have done in 2028, and scale a

[04:05] fleet of over 50,000 machines by 2031,

[04:08] which is enough to give monthly scans to

[04:10] a billion people. So no, the Midjourney

[04:12] spa probably isn't deleting 30% of all

[04:14] deaths next year, and the haters

[04:16] roasting the physics have legit reasons

[04:18] to be hating. But after years of

[04:19] watching the smartest people alive use

[04:21] their powers to create God, there's

[04:23] something refreshing about a profitable

[04:25] AI lab bringing accessible health

[04:26] optimizations to the masses. But another

[04:29] thing that's refreshing is Retool, the

[04:31] sponsor of today's video. Their research

[04:33] found that 93% of tech leaders say

[04:36] they're worried about running

[04:37] AI-generated apps in production, and the

[04:39] other 7% are probably too dumb to

[04:41] realize that they've already been

[04:43] zero-dayed. That's one reason why Retool

[04:45] just launched a new app builder, where

[04:47] you can safely connect those apps to

[04:48] your team's databases and APIs

[04:50] while inheriting your org's auth

[04:52] permissions and audit logs. You can

[04:53] import an existing app from tools like

[04:56] Cloud Code, or you can start with a

[04:57] fresh prompt like I'm doing here, and

[04:59] Retool turns it into a full-stack React

[05:01] app with code you can inspect. You also

[05:04] get full visibility into the queries it

[05:05] runs and the data that comes back,

[05:07] instead of just blindly trusting

[05:09] whatever the AI hallucinates. Retool is

[05:11] the missing link for actually shipping

[05:13] all your AI prototypes. Try it out

[05:15] today, and you'll get free app imports

[05:17] through July 1st, plus bonus AI credits

[05:19] on every paid plan. This has been the

[05:21] Code Report. Thanks for watching, and I

[05:23] will see you in the next one.