Ben Self @bself

‘Sup.

Hey @thsottiaux can we please get a blue dot for finished threads in codex in the ChatGPT app? Or at least preserve our pinned threads from desktop? Hard to find the threads to keep working on across 4 projects with multiple threads each project- they get buried easily.

I'm a cardiologist. Something just happened today that I genuinely did not see coming — and it could change the future of preventive medicine more than anything I've written about on this platform. Midjourney — the AI company that became famous for generating images from text prompts — just announced a medical hardware division and unveiled a working prototype of a full-body scanner unlike anything that's ever existed. It's called the Midjourney Scanner. And it works like this. You step into a shallow pool of water. You stand on a platform that slowly descends — about two inches per second — through a ring containing roughly half a million tiny ultrasonic transducers, each the size of a grain of sand. Every one of them acts as both a speaker and a microphone, sending ultrasonic waves through your body from every angle and recording what comes back. 60 seconds later, you step out. The scan is done. No radiation. No magnets. No claustrophobia. No IV contrast. Just sound, water, and an almost incomprehensible amount of computing power — roughly 2 petaflops processing 17 gigabytes per second of raw acoustic data — reconstructing a 3D map of your entire internal anatomy down to half a millimeter resolution. Organs. Tissues. Blood vessels. Bones. Muscle. Fat distribution. All segmented by AI in real time. As a cardiologist who has spent months writing about how the standard screening playbook misses the majority of future heart attacks — this is the technology I've been waiting for without knowing it existed. Here's why this matters for the future of your heart. Right now, getting a detailed look inside your cardiovascular system requires either a CT scan (radiation), an MRI (magnets, claustrophobia, 45-60 minutes, $1,000+), or a coronary CT angiogram (radiation, IV contrast, limited availability). These are powerful tools. I order them regularly and they save lives. But they're reactive. You get them when something is already suspected. They're expensive. They're uncomfortable. And for most people, they happen once — maybe twice — in a lifetime. Imagine instead: a 60-second scan with no radiation that you could repeat monthly or quarterly. Tracking cardiac structure over time. Watching body composition shift. Detecting changes in organ size, fluid distribution, or vascular architecture before symptoms ever develop. Building a longitudinal dataset of YOUR body that AI can analyze for patterns no single snapshot would reveal. That's what Midjourney is building toward. The company plans 50,000 scanners worldwide over six years, with capacity for a billion scans per month. The first location — the "Midjourney Spa" in San Francisco — opens at the end of 2027 with 10 scanners alongside saunas, cold plunges, and a gym. The scan costs a few dollars. The experience is designed to feel like wellness, not medicine. The technology is built on Butterfly Network's ultrasound-on-chip platform — 40 modules per scanner — combined with Midjourney's own AI segmentation and reconstruction stack. David Holz, the founder, claims the system aims for image quality comparable to MRI in many aspects but at nearly 100x the speed with zero radiation. Now the caveats — because I'm a physician and the caveats matter enormously. This is a Gen 1 prototype. About a dozen people have been scanned so far. Current scan time is actually closer to 20 minutes, not 60 seconds — the system is bottlenecked by bandwidth and reconstruction algorithms. The 60-second target is aspirational for future hardware generations. It is not FDA-cleared for diagnostic use. Midjourney is starting with body composition maps — a category below diagnostic imaging in the regulatory hierarchy. The path from "beautiful 3D body scans" to "clinically validated diagnostic tool that your cardiologist can act on" runs through years of clinical trials, comparative studies against MRI and CT gold standards, and FDA review. No independent clinical validation has been published. The imaging claims come from Midjourney's own demonstrations. Comparative data against established modalities does not yet exist. And the privacy implications of full-body internal scans at planetary scale — a billion scans per month — is a conversation that hasn't even started yet. So I want to be precise. This is not ready for clinical medicine today. It may not be ready for years. Many ambitious medical hardware projects have failed in the gap between prototype and product. But. The fact that a working prototype exists — producing real segmented 3D anatomy from sound waves and compute alone — means the physics works. The engineering works. The question is no longer "is this possible" but "how fast can it be validated and scaled." And if it is validated — if the resolution holds up against MRI, if the AI segmentation proves reliable, if the regulatory path clears — then what we're looking at is the most significant new imaging modality in 50 years. For my entire career, preventive cardiology has been limited by the fact that seeing inside the body is expensive, slow, uncomfortable, and infrequent. We catch disease late because we image rarely. We image rarely because imaging is hard. A 60-second, no-radiation, spa-based full-body scan that costs a few dollars would demolish every one of those barriers. I've written about AI detecting inflamed arteries. About gene editing curing cholesterol. About GLP-1 drugs rewriting metabolic medicine. About cellular reprogramming reversing aging. This is the missing piece: the ability to see inside every human body, routinely, safely, and affordably — so all of those interventions can be deployed before the disease arrives instead of after. The company that taught AI to generate images from imagination just built a machine that generates images from the human body. The future of medicine showed up today from the last place anyone expected.

Midjourney @midjourney

3 weeks ago

Announcing a new division of Midjourney called "Midjourney Medical"

3K 6K 40K 18.5M 11K

@c3K @midjourney For sure, although sometimes good enough or a potential help is… better than nothing? In this particular one the results of a false positive on a scan seem much less of concern than the benefits? Unless the reality is less than what they’re saying.

It seems like every day there’s a new announcement of some new medical device or advancement that will fundamentally change human health. What an incredible time to be alive. Yesterday’s announcement by @midjourney is kind of mind blowing: midjourney.com/medical/blogpo…

I’ve heard a lot of amazing speeches, but this one might be better than all of them (and I don’t even care about the Knicks)

Aaron Rupar @atrupar

2 weeks ago

here is Mamdani's entire speech at the Knicks parade, which is easily the best speech I've ever heard at an event of this sort

2K 13K 100K 13.5M 32K

I can’t imagine how many poor decisions by @FIFAcom caused us to have the opening game for Canada in Canada to have so so many empty seats

Love it.

adidas UK @adidasUK

3 weeks ago

CHOOSE SCOTLAND 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🏆 @ScotlandNT @LewisCapaldi

249 5K 30K 4.9M 3K

@JustinHorn @bryan_johnson @bp_blueprint Yes, found it to be the best option after looking at several out there. Customer service was great with questions, too!

@HeyItsMeTheDev @HunterBiden @HunterFor2028 This is what the internet was created for.

Ok, you’re right it is quite fun and addictive: I just went 76-6, think you can go 82-0? 82-0.com/share?id=bPrIU… #NBA #82and0

I do love the @RobinhoodApp credit card - esp the 3% back into your investing acct, but the combo of low credit limits + delay in applying payments (which oddly only occurs if you go over the limit) makes it super painful to use. Hopefully they get it right soon!

Ugh, nooooooo!

Adam Schefter @AdamSchefter

a month ago

Full trade terms, per ESPN sources: 🏈Rams receive: Myles Garrett 🏈Browns receive: Jared Verse, a 2027 first-round pick, a 2028 2nd and a 2029 3rd.

790 1K 10K 4.2M 396

We dropped our daughter at camp yesterday. She brought 5 photos of the dog, 3 of her favorite horse, and 1 of the rest of us. Nice to know we made the cut.

I’m hearing from multiple folks who would know that @AndyBeshearKY had a very good night in South Carolina. He brought the house down at the Blue Palmetto Dinner and made a real impression at Jim Clyburn’s Fish Fry. Clyburn reportedly called it “one of the most incredible speeches I've heard from a Democratic governor from the South.” That matters. A Democratic governor who wins in deep-red Kentucky, talks like a normal person, leads with decency, and can connect in South Carolina? Keep an eye on Andy.

keyboard_arrow_left Previous keyboard_arrow_right Next

@suekhim Geometry and decimals

Finally got around to watching this - super interesting to think about how to apply this to a hospitality biz: how would @wguidara apply this to his vision of hospitality? Build around customers, with humans being the touch points at bars / restaurants? Does the customer model become the most valuable thing for any hospitality biz? And the goal to just be to build as many touch points / locations as possible?

Y Combinator @ycombinator

2 months ago

In a recent batch talk, YC General Partner @t_blom broke down how to build a self-improving, AI-native company. He walks through how to create recursive, self-improving AI loops, and why founders who get this right will run companies that improve while they sleep. 00:00 —

74 236 2K 591K 5K

@joshhendler Hah, no kidding -- I saw that too. Also most of the tech side reads as if it was written by scorned vendors -- like the odd focus on Hawkfish.

Side note, compared blood tests from @bp_blueprint, @WHOOP, and a few others and found the blueprint ones to be the most tests for the best price. Loaded the results into my drs system and whoop, and now they all understand the results.

Example #432 for how our healthcare system is broken. I just got a bill for regular bloodwork through my Dr in Feb, for which they charged the insurance company ~$1700 and i paid ~180. Got all those tests + a ton more from @bp_blueprint last week for the same $180 out of pocket