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Midjourney Goes Medical, Noam Shazeer and Dean Ball Join OpenAI

TBPN breaks down Midjourney Medical, an ambitious ultrasound body scanner funded by Midjourney’s bootstrapped success, plus OpenAI’s hires of Noam Shazeer…

Midjourney Medical is framed by TBPN as an expansion, not a pivot. The core idea is that David Holz is using the cash flow and independence of Midjourney to fund a much harder hardware project: a new kind of ultrasound-based full-body scanner.

The hosts connect the announcement to Holz’s earlier work at Leap Motion. That company already sat at the intersection of sensing, algorithms and human-computer interaction. Midjourney then took a very different path from the usual venture-backed AI startup: no known venture funding, a long period centered on Discord, and a strong data flywheel from users choosing and remixing generated images.

The medical scanner itself is the technical centerpiece. TBPN describes a 70 cm ring with hundreds of thousands of ultrasonic sensors, firing structured waves and listening to the echoes. The system moves enormous amounts of data, combines many slices, and aims to reconstruct a detailed 3D map of the body in roughly a minute.

What makes the project stand out is not only the imaging stack, but the intended experience. Holz appears to want a scan to feel closer to visiting a spa than going to a clinic: quick, autonomous and designed with a level of taste that medical devices rarely prioritize. If that works, preventive imaging could become a much more frequent consumer behavior.

The episode also uses Midjourney as a case study in founder freedom. A profitable, bootstrapped company can take strange and ambitious bets that a VC-backed startup, locked into fundraising cycles and narrow KPIs, might struggle to justify.

TBPN closes the segment with the broader AI talent war. OpenAI’s hiring of Noam Shazeer brings in one of the most important researchers behind Transformers, T5 and sparse MoE models. Dean Ball adds a very different kind of leverage: policy judgment and national-level thinking about how AI should be governed and deployed.

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