AI startup Midjourney, best known for turning text prompts into images, has unveiled its first hardware project, a full-body ultrasound machine. The company plans to build an entire fleet of the devices and install them in dedicated spa sites, starting with one in San Francisco that will also include a gym, sauna and jacuzzi, according to Bloomberg.
Midjourney presented the product, called the Midjourney Scanner, at an event in San Francisco. The move marks an unexpected push into personal health and medical technology. Alongside the ultrasound project, the company said it is working on four other hardware projects and four software projects, with a goal of completing at least two hardware projects soon.
CEO David Holz said, “We’ve never built a device like this before,” and claimed the technology is superior to MRI devices in some respects. He said the target is to build a fleet of 50,000 such machines, adding, “We’re not even using this in AI yet, just really cool software and hardware.” He declined to discuss pricing.
Holz also said regulatory approvals from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration would be obtained gradually. “One of the goals is to do the easy things first” and collect approvals one by one until the device can perform thousands of types of diagnoses, he said. “In ten years, it won’t just be an imaging device, but also a therapeutic device.” Midjourney has already signed a lease for the San Francisco spa complex, which is about 2,300 square meters, and Holz said, “We signed the lease and already have the design.” The expansion comes as the company faces lawsuits from Warner Bros. and Disney over alleged copyright infringement tied to AI-generated images and videos featuring their famous characters.
