alt Hacker NewsMidjourney Medical
Comments
Strong theranos vibes
HN is so negative, they are genuinely making a interesting move instead of just generating BS images, they are actually trying to make something that could benefit humanity. Whether they succeed or not, who knows, but great that they are trying.
MRI & CT go from captured data -> displayed image via real provable hard math.
This seems to imply that there is an LLM layer involved. Which means hallucinations. No thanks.
How are people possibly taking this seriously?
> That, collectively, we can begin to change our relationship with our bodies and start to ask questions like: if we can catch things early, can we change our lifestyles to correct them?
We can already ask this question...
> And seeing our bodies change over time, alongside our actions, how much can we improve our health, our minds, and our lives?
Again, we can already ask this question
> We think it's completely possible that with enough early imaging in the future, the world could avoid 30% of all deaths and 50% of all healthcare costs. The cultural, physical, and mental health benefits of all of this are hard to comprehend, but also hard to overstate.
What? I have no idea what is meant here by "hard to overstate".
> You want as much data as you can get about your health as quickly and as cheaply as possible. In other words, you want a technology optimized for getting as many “megabytes per second per dollar” of information about your body.
Thanks for including the "megabytes per second per dollar" unit breakdown, I didn't understand the first sentence at all without that!
> And we live longer, healthier lives, better lives.
More AI slop
> When you step into the water, you’re standing on top of a platform. The platform is connected to rails and begins to descend into the water - an elevator gently lowering you at around 2 inches, or 5 centimeters, per second.
More AI slop. You'd only be done in 60 seconds if you're exactly 5 feet tall
It's a plot twist no one expected coming, to say the least.
This is like the plot of the movie Elysium
we're hitting the hype peak shortly
Dipping into the pool of piss is a curious design choice.
So this is the purpose of building the backroom pools
Midjourney people are talented people within image generation but this is giving me some really serious theranos vibes.
I presume that Theranos had some talented people as well and some strong figures back at its time as well. It isn't the strongest of indicators.
It's been a really long time since I heard the name of Midjourney again. their name got a bit unheard of after LLM models like Chatgpt and nano banana started supported image generation, so I am unsure if this is being done to get known again or to pivot from image generation itself.
There are tons of factors which make me a bit skeptic about the whole ordeal.
> "Fullbody Ultrasonic Computational Tomography"
FUCT, huh? Genius marketing move.
I used to work in ultrasound, and full body scans with the body underwater is definitely feasible and probably a good idea. Bit of a weird direction for them to take though??
Also there's absolutely no way that it will be as good as MRI. In general ultrasound imaging is shit. The main reasons it is used are because it is very cheap and completely harmless. The actual images you get are mostly just speckle. If MRI was cheap then nobody would use ultrasound. Full body ultrasound will definitely give better images because you have a wider aperture and can do fancier beamforming (probably "full matrix capture" and then beamforming in software; normally ultrasound probes do it in hardware). But it's still not going to be as good as MRI.
The exception to that is pregnancy - that is a super ideal case because you are imaging a nice clean interface in a fluid and there are no pesky bones in the way. Most of the body isn't like that at all.
This is very concerning:
> Normally, for every diagnostic medical capability you need FDA approval. We’re starting by just giving you detailed body composition maps — and we’ll be submitting regular test results to the FDA for increased capabilities.
Ah yes, just "detailed body composition maps", nothing major. It's just radiology, not like people spend years of extensive education and have to sign off on every finding, often lying awake at night that they may have missed something. It's easy, don't let the Doctorpolice tell you otherwise. Seems very ̶T̶h̶e̶r̶a̶n̶o̶s̶ familiar. Also, not saying em dash automatically denote LLM writing, but come on, this whole thing reads very slopgenerated.
I have questions in general.
Why Midjourney? Do they have expertise? Even if so, why reuse a name that doesn't exactly denote reliable, consistent or trustworthy output? Why start as a spa with fancy LED lights clearly focused on experience over selling/leasing the whole-body implementation to third parties? Is the latter actually theres, how exactly does the licensing deal look and again, why them? Have they got any type of independent data to back up any of their findings? This just has the smell of something that, a few years from now everyone will be astounded that anyone ever believed this to be possible, for it is so patently ridiculous.
Never been a fan of image generation models for a variety of reasons, but this is downright dangerous, no way about it. Even if the technology as licensed works well, there are very good reasons why operating an MRI and seeing patients is not something you can do, just because you can afford to buy one. There is expertise needed here that, if this was coming from an established Medical Clinic and backed by research I'd be skeptical for such a spa setup to overcome, but again, this isn't even that. Best case scenario, this causes a VC to go bankrupt before the "spa" open and gets a front page on the goop magazine, worst case, patients are harmed, families destroyed and a comparatively minor penalty is administered/a pardon bought.
Not an assessment on the underlying concept/technology mind you, just the way Midjourney of all people are going about this.
So the device itself seems cool and potentially useful as a low cost high volume alternative to MRIs that might be worth it for just like regular checkups at doctors offices before referring to more serious imaging if it detects something.
The whole spa angle is cringe at best, a glaring red flag at worst. Why not market this as a serious medical device if it actually works? Who asked for a spa with a novel computer imaging thing?
Health data in the hands of some AI company, what could go wrong
It's great to see money made in one of the few remaining unregulated fields like math and software applied to problems in the heavily regulated healthcare industry. There is an asymmetry in healthcare innovation that nobody ever got fired for blocking a good thing, but you can lose your job for approving a bad one.
I'm also following the very inspirational journey of the former Gitlab CEO who battles cancer by founding companies with his own money [0].
There's a certain type of people the Midjourney folks are involved with in SF. They're high on their own supply. See also hacker houses etc
But why? It doesn’t say why?
This is the most "getting high on your own supply" I have ever seen.
What the hell are they talking about. This is no way real and a late April fools joke right? Right?
Yesssssss, AI overlords put me in your dolphin technology powered human deep fryer.
We are at pets.com stage of AI bubble. This time the business model is LLM-generated, though.
The app known for making shit up (as in: that's it's whole shtick)... Getting into medical advice?
This looks remarkably dystopian.
I wish them all the best and hope they succeed, but can’t help but suspect they’ve fallen into deep LLM psychosis. Even if you assume they can build this thing and it works as described and then get past all the regulatory hurdles, the scale of infrastructure they’re talking about is enormous.
Theranos 2.0?
The scans take 60 seconds, but at their stated numbers each machine would need to do a scan every 30 seconds 24/7. At this point I stopped reading because I don't have time to parse slop.
Need an update from Elon about what he meant when he said "Midjourney is not mid" and what he thinks now https://x.com/minchoi/status/1766131045177409784
This shit is immune to parody, it’s the most California thing to ever exist. “We’ll fix your health problems with an AI spa”. A spa. Give me a break.
They'll get so much money, all the 60 year old billionaires in SF are so desperate not to die.
What the actual fuck
This is not the AI branding I would associate with medical technology.
Oh hey look, I have the spleen of an elf! And my bones have a really nice cottage motif now.
What the hell is wrong with companies these days?
> you want a technology optimized for getting as many “megabytes per second per dollar” of information about your body
No, I fucking don’t, Chad, and you’re weird for thinking that I do.
Medical Doctors: scans on healthy patients are not a good idea
Tech bros: hold my beer…
This is kind of cool shit that makes Silicon Valley great. Thanks for switching it up!
At least it isn't yet another AI wrapper product and it is a bet on useful hardware.
[flagged]
[flagged]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
spa as a regulatory bypass is clever, body comp data first and diagnostics later. 500k transducers doing full body ultrasound in 60s is a massive hardware bet for an image gen company tho
[dead]
[dead]
I just want more people to take on crazy big bets.
Wait is this just an ultrasound tomographic scanner?
Any which way we can get to the Torrent Nexus fastest <thumbs up emoji>
It has been said in this thread that we shouldn't scan healthy people because false positives. That's a good point. But I also think we are still looking at the small picture: catch diseases.
The slightly bigger picture is to prevent them, and there early warnings can help a lot.
At a yet slightly higher level, some people think that we are about to enter the age of superintelligence. That's a separate debate but it's not something I would disregard entirely. In an age of superintelligence, our goals and tools for healthcare can be different. I'm very much doubt that the medical establishment and we as a society will embrace a world where each person has some model of their metabolism running on some hardware and being updated and monitored 24/7, but this is already a reality in many industries where it is called "digital twins", so maybe this is something you'll go for if you are a trillionaire.
Zooming out and flying higher, the goal is of course to be young forever and let your body stay away in state space from most diseases. Is that something superintelligence can do?