Midjourney Goes Medical, Noam Shazeer & Dean Ball Join OpenAI | Diet TBPN

0:00Mid-Journey.

0:02John Coogan:Why Mid-Journey pivoted to medical machines? It's not a pivot, it's an expansion. It's a second act, a third act for David Holes, a fantastic entrepreneur, extremely inspiring entrepreneur. Maybe we should give some background on David Holes. Wait, should we talk about the show today first? Yeah, please. Because this is the first time that Derek Thompson and Jake Paul have been on the same podcast. And I want to just take a moment to just appreciate that. Because a lot of people said it would never happen. They said it was impossible. We're going all over the place today. Two different worlds.

0:38But we're bringing them together. Derek Thompson's kicking off our guest lineup today at 1130. Yeah. You don't need an introduction there. We have Renee Haas. from Arm, CEO, also on the board of SoftBank. And then we'll be closing it out with David Senra and Jake Paul at the end of the show.

0:59John Coogan:Live in the TV pan, I'll turn on. Anyway, yesterday, MidJourney announced a new division of the company, an expansion, not a pivot, called MidJourney Medical. We'll watch the video. We'll go through the MidJourney scanner. Tyler was actually at the launch event, has some news to break it down. But first, let's kick it off with the history of David Holes because it's fascinating. Grew up in Florida. Son of a dentist. He's not the dog walker. He's on Team Dentist over there. Son of a dentist. We have a son of a dentist on our team. We have a son of a dentist on our team. And played video games growing up.

1:32John Coogan:Dentist camp. Dentist son camp. Dentist son camp. Look at those teeth. Oh, wow. Wow. Nepo teeth. Nepo teeth. He's got nepo teeth. Go back. Go back. Cut back. Look at that. Big smile. Big smile. Well, there we go. That's crazy. That's crazy. That's crazy. Wow. Your father really saved his back for you. Born on third base with teeth-wise. It's crazy over there. Played video games as a kid, obviously, but starts hacking them. Learns a little bit about computers. Super intelligent. PhD in math. Track. I don't think he graduated or finished the PhD, but, I mean, you know, at that level of engineering.

2:10He turned down.

2:11John Coogan:He turned down the PhD to go work at NASA, I think. So he was at NASA. Eventually, it branches into entrepreneurship, starts Leap Motion. Pretty traditional venture-backed startup, raised money. I think Founders Fund was in at least one of the rounds. But it was a grind by all accounts. And so the first product brought hand tracking to VR. We should pull up a video of the original Leap Motion because there's some cool demos and you can see how it worked. And it's not actually that crazy to think about what we're going to talk about today with the Mid Journey Medical Scanner. if you know the history of Leap Motion and some of the technology that was employed there.

2:49John Coogan:Yes, this is a different use case, different product, very much bigger. But in terms of sensing, detecting, mapping, using algorithms, yeah. Yeah, and so when David was talking about the backstory, he was kind of going through some of the technicalities of how the Leap Motion worked. It was incredible because he was like, I mean, this is early 20-teens, and he's using these deep neural nets. He said it was a mixture of X Hertz model. It was like incredibly far ahead of the curve, just on like deep learning. And it's just like on this kind of like weird, like side project. It's like doing hand motion.

3:23Yeah, everyone thought VR was going to take off.

3:25John Coogan:There was so much energy around Oculus and the dev community. But it was a tough, it was a very tough business. A lot of hardware challenges, much less mature supply chain. Everything's expensive. And there's all these complex market dynamics with other big companies. Meta bought Oculus. Apple was investing heavily. Eventually, Apple actually tried to buy David's first company, Leap Motion. But the deal fell through at the 11th hour. I think it actually happened twice. There was a reporting that Apple had printed welcome packets to all of the Leap Motion employees, being like, you're getting onboarded today.

3:58John Coogan:And then the deal fell through, which is crazy. You don't see that normally. David turned it down. He turned it down. There is some crazy reporting about getting in and basically being like, this is too corporate, or this is not the vibe. we're not going to be successful here. It was really rough for the company. They had to do layoffs, but they kept building and they sold devices to hackers. Yeah, look at this, the Leap Motion. This is, yeah, Play Fruit Ninja. Now a lot of this stuff can be done with cameras and hand tracking. And the hand tracking on the modern VR device is pretty good just from the headset.

4:25John Coogan:Hand tracking in Apple Vision Pro, my favorite device, is fantastic. But at the time you needed a third party device. So you had, can you scroll the video down to show the actual device a little bit? Yeah, this little, like, It looks like a stick of gum. Very small, very neat, very cool. But ultimately, very much a dev kit. Never got to mass consumer adoption like an Oura ring or a Whoop band or anything like that. It was not a must-have for the average gamer, the average consumer, the average technologist. After about a decade, David was able to take a step back and start hacking on the next thing.

4:59John Coogan:AI image generation, you know mid-journey, obviously. Huge viral success. Broke a lot of the traditional rules. So no venture funding, no front end, no website, no, no app. Like really they, they, I mean, now they have a front end and stuff, but, uh, years went by where it was just a discord. Everything was in a discord and they scaled that discord to millions of members. So huge that the company discord, I think it was the biggest, the mid journey discord was the biggest discord for a while. They had to scale their systems at that company, but you're doing all this like off balance sheet R and D basically.

5:31John Coogan:And on day one, you just get a fantastic mobile app for every device. Social experience. Social experience. That was the second thing. Yeah, because this was the prompt engineering era, right, where people had their favorite prompts. Yep. It really helped kind of cultivate. It was multiplayer on day one. Yeah. And so David has this quote. I think it's from him saying, like, if you show someone a blank box and you tell them, hey, this is a magical AI machine that can generate you a picture of anything, People will just type in dog and they'll get a picture of a dog and they would get the same picture if they just went to Google Images.

6:06John Coogan:That's not what AI is actually interesting at. It's the astronaut riding a horse on the moon. The thing that that picture doesn't exist already. So it's you flying a F-16 in your hometown and like personalizing and doing something that would typically take a very large CGI budget or some sort of Photoshop master to actually whip up or collage together. you could do that with just one prompt and so the multiplayer nature of mid journey when I jump into the mid journey discord the first thing I see is your crazy prompt your 12 levels deep prompt injecting thinking of different keywords doing different s refs for style references doing all these different tweaks and then I can just see oh he he used this model and he specified these dimensions he's getting really good results so I'll take that but I I want to make it about I want to make my images about a dog your mosquito guy so you're going to make them about mosquitoes, right?

6:59John Coogan:And you can take my prompt and just sort of remix it. And so some of the mosquito propaganda prompts I had back in those days were crazy. Yeah, I never ended up sharing them. They were simply too good. Yeah, well, you lost the war and the mosquitoes going away. Whether you like it or not, Google is focused entirely on killing mosquitoes, apparently. By generating four candidate images for each prompt, Mid Journey got a bunch of really valuable data on what a correct image looked like for a specific prompt. This was another sort of mid-journey innovation. I don't know if they were the first ones to do this, but it was really key to the mid-journey flow.

7:32John Coogan:It would, instead of generating you an HD image, it would generate you four low-res images, and you'd be like, ah, that has the right vibe, that has the right style, that has the right layout, and then it would get that feedback and be able to iterate. At the same time, Stable Diffusion had some really good results, but it ran locally, it was open source, and so they weren't having the data flywheel like mid-journey was, And so there were a lot of really positive things there. Now every company has a data flywheel and can iterate on that. But it was an important innovation. The company still that we know of hasn't taken venture funding.

8:05John Coogan:So I think David Holes owns most, if not all, of the company. And after the big meta deal to Vauer Vibes, there's clearly enough cash flow to fund other projects. David's actually been talking about this for years, this idea of a medical device. Yeah, the meta deal, I don't think any specifics were ever released. but I think it's safe to assume it was in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Hundreds of billions, trillions, potentially. Potentially, potentially. But enough to be able to take some really, really, really big swings and be able to have a balance sheet like a heavily funded private company.

8:41Yeah, so it's really cool.

8:43John Coogan:I was hoping for a VR headset, honestly. I really wanted a VR headset. I mean, this is just one of the hardware projects, right? He says, like, I think there were, like, eight little, you know, images. that teaser thing. So there's a bunch more hardware. Because after the Apple Vision Pro launch, I think he put out some sort of review being like, we're going to have to do it ourselves, which I love. Anyway, let's play the Mid Journey launch video for Mid Journey Medical and see what's going on here in this two minute video. The goat is still on screen. The goat is in our stream, not in the Mid Journey.

9:20John Coogan:Did the aesthetics of this video carry through to the actual event experience i only saw a few photos but did did the event have a nice uh vibe to it yeah it was very cool they had a similar like warm lighting everywhere yeah they had like a kind of fake versions of the real machine it's like way too big obviously to move around yeah but they have these kind of big tubes that like resembled it then they had a smaller version you could put your hand in yeah i did it in my hand interesting are you healthy is your hand healthy we need you coding at all times prompting i think it it's hard because that was like a small like demo version so the resolution was lower sure but uh someone else said that uh they figured out that they had some like wrist thing because of boxing tunnel yeah they found some issue you can just use an if statement in real time yeah if if san franciscan then yes carpal tunnel.

10:16John Coogan:Very cool vibes. I've always said this about mid journey that I think when you like people debate is AI art, art or whatever. I always think of mid journey as a David holds art experience. And I feel like you as the prompter are merely the, the, the museum goer in the museum of David. And he is the one who is creating in the mid journey team. is the curator, they're the artists, and you are experiencing the art through the prompts, but the decisions and the taste comes from David. And so our Mid Journey images tasteful, I think they have taste, I think they have David's taste, and then there's the opportunity for a user to put a little bit more on top, but by default, I think the reason Mid Journey has been successful is because it's so opinionated and it's not trying to just be a stock photo generator.

11:07Yeah, even this video was fully filmed by David. Really? He was like the one holding the camera.

11:11John Coogan:That's cool. Yeah. Love this guy. It's amazing. It makes me a little bit emotional. It's so cool. Yeah. It makes me feel like we're finally living in the future. No one making this kind of device has ever been as cool as David Holt. It's true. Straight up. I'm willing to state that as a fact. It's just true. This is not the first medical device product that we've talked about on the show. But the medical device industry does not have aura. Yeah. They have no motion. He's bringing motion and aura. To the medical device field category. Yes. He's inventing medical devices. I think a lot of people are going to want to get these scans because it is a beautiful representation, futuristic representation of the human form.

11:57It's personalized.

11:59John Coogan:Also, just never blackpill on startups. He could be so successful and he doesn't have any venture money and he's never going to sell this business. And so you have like 12 biomedical device companies that are like, we have to, we cannot get steamrolled by David Holes. We got to work with this company. We got to buy from that YC company. Like the competitive dynamics of the market are always more complicated than just a single winner comes and steamrolls. All the startups and all the incumbents, that's not how things ever play out. Life is more complicated. The economy is more complicated. So never black belt.

12:28John Coogan:Let's play the deep technical dive, the technical deep dive. Did he make this music too, I wonder? Yeah, and he also made this in, I think, Blender, he said. Whoa. Like, all the animations are all made by hand. By hand, though? He's the one person. No AI? I guess he's doing Blender. I mean, for this, it's a great use case for Blender, because you're cloning, you know. I don't know if it was actually Blender. It was some three, I mean. CGI stack. Incredible music selection.

13:01John Coogan:Oh, yeah, there's words we should be reading. There's no voiceover, but we can kind of give you the summary here.

13:11John Coogan:The overviews, we'll start with something called transducer. We're going through transducers, active speakers, and microphones. Imagine a choir of 9 ,000 singers and an audience of 9 ,000 people all listening carefully. The transducers are controllable at a rate of 100 million times per second. Together, they fire in a pattern that sends out structured waves. Those are the structured waves you're seeing. The waves travel out at a speed of 1 ,481 meters per second. We construct a ring of 40 of these systems, 70 centimeters in diameter. The ring consists of 358 ,000 ultrasonic sensors. The chips take turns sending out waves.

13:56John Coogan:As the waves have a chance to dissipate, we fire the next one. One by one, they fire at a rate of up to 1 ,000 times per second. You're vibing out. The waves travel across the tank in 480 microseconds, about 1 ,000th of a second. Hundreds of thousands of transducers listen. Each sensor resolves motions smaller than the width of an atom, not micrometers or nanometers, but picometers. Working together, hundreds of sensors can even push into the subatomic femtometer range, finer than the scale of atoms, a scale where we don't even have anything you've heard of. The system captures data at a leisurely 17 gigabytes a second.

14:46John Coogan:Gigabytes of sonic reverberations flow around your body.

14:52John Coogan:and from vibations they form images with this device each probe sees different angles of your body we combined hundreds of waves and thousands of sub images to get the final product over over 40 gigabytes of data moves through the system to just see one slice of your body we analyze the images making out organs structures and tissues of course all good uses of AI there you go not gonna be all that here we show a slice of what we can see with 25 different biological structures we do this again and again and again as you move through the ring so are you moving through the ring or is the ring moving around you no no you're moving down the ring stays oh that's why you saw in the The video is a little platform you stand on.

15:48John Coogan:Yeah, platform, interesting. Over a period of 60 seconds, the goal is to obtain several hundred slices of your body,

15:56John Coogan:reconstructing across 21 servers with two petaflops of compute power and up to 806 terabytes of raw data. The slices form a 3D map with the ability to resolve internal tissue details as small as half a millimeter. Wow. Limina Leap says, I still can't believe they missed the med journey opportunity here. Less than a dozen of these systems operating at full speed can do a full body scan of every, their goal is a fleet of 50 ,000 of these scanners capable of a billion scans a month. That's basically everyone on earth. Tyler, what's the logic of putting these, integrating these into spas? They want to make standalone spas or they want to make a first one in San Francisco that's like a flagship.

16:40And then I can't imagine all 50 ,000 scanners would come with a full spa. But yeah, I think he said the plan was you start with the big one. I think there's going to be like 10 or so in the first SF location. And then in some places, there'll be like hundreds of these. Some places there's like one or two. But yeah, I think that the spa is like mostly because at least he rationalized it because like, oh, you know, going to the clinic or whatever, it's like not a good experience.

17:05John Coogan:Yeah. This should be like very quick. and it should feel much more like going to a sauna or steam room or whatever than going to the doctor. Because you can imagine you don't really need a doctor present during it, right? It's autonomous. They should create a bunch of needles in the ring that come in and just kind of connect with you, deliver whatever peptides, hormones, PEDs that it deems necessary. Potentially. Well, I mean, he also talked about this. This system is pretty overpowered, he said. so you could like theoretically instead of just like basically reading like what's going on your body you can like write stuff too right so you can like do non-invasive surgeries whatever by beaming light yeah yeah we talked to some folks who have done that where it's like it pulverizes the cancer the tumor with uh ultrasonic waves yeah like think about like euv yep uh lithography or something you have if you like you know position the light in very certain ways you can like actually make a change too not just like you're saying potentially we could pivot this into more chip fabrication capacity.

18:03That would be the goal. Yeah, yeah.

18:06John Coogan:Yeah, sorry. We can make way more money just making more chips. Yeah, one of my friends over on X anibology. Great account says the obvious next step once you have a full body ultrasound scanner is to use the ultrasound to do useful things to the body. Delete tissues, make cells divide, reprogram cells, read plus write. If you're an engineer interested in solving the right side of sci-fi medical devices, we're building this and hiring. Well, let's go through some more of the reactions. Mid-Journey launching an ultrasound scanner is such a clear example of freedom enjoyed by bootstrap companies that VC-backed companies would never have.

18:43John Coogan:Only time will tell if it's the right bet, but such bold bets require ownership and a kind of devil-may-care attitude. That's somewhat true, but the counter to all that is like the Elon Musk projects and a variety of founders. And specs. And specs, but also So, you know, like Sam Ullman has done this too, where it's like, okay, there's a new idea, get a new team, fund it, and it's on the side. Like there are a variety of entrepreneurs that are playing the VC game, marshalling capital, and then have the permission to work on crazy stuff, like a mass driver on the moon, et cetera. But in general, I agree with this point that a lot of founders get locked in a VC loop of you got to raise money every 18 months.

19:26John Coogan:Once you've got to hit the core KPI, you don't have the time or cash flow because you're win, win, win, fight, fight, fight. And it's very, very interesting and such a narrative violation that Midjourney has become such a machine financially in, you know, people would say it's a commodity market. People would say it's a highly competitive market. You're going up against Google. You're with Nano Banana. You're going up against OpenAI. And yet Midjourney has carved out a fantastic community, a fantastic user base, a fantastic business model. And it's really, it's a testament to something. It's just awesome.