AI Summary
5 min readMidjourney, the company that built a beloved AI image generator inside a Discord server without ever taking venture capital, announced a new division called Midjourney Medical at a launch event in San Francisco. The announcement landed alongside two major AI talent moves: legendary researcher Noam Shazeer left his role as Gemini co-lead at Google DeepMind to join OpenAI, and policy thinker Dean Ball also joined the company. The episode wove these developments together with a deep look at founder David Holz’s improbable career arc, from a near-sale to Apple on his first hardware company to building what could be the most ambitious consumer medical device in years.
From Leap Motion to Midjourney: The David Holz Story
David Holz started as a math PhD-track student who turned down work at NASA to build Leap Motion, a hand-tracking device for VR that debuted in the early 2010s. The device used deep neural nets—"incredibly far ahead of the curve" for the time, the hosts noted—to map hand movements, but it never reached mass consumer adoption. Apple tried to acquire the company twice; the first deal fell through at the 11th hour, and Holz reportedly turned down the second because the corporate environment wasn't the right fit. The company survived without layoffs, selling devices to hackers and developers.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:00) **Episode Intro & Guest Lineup** - The hosts kick off the show, highlighting the first-time pairing of Derek Thompson and Jake Paul, plus a full guest lineup including Renee Hoss and David Senra.
- 2 (01:10) **Midjourney Medical: Announcement & Backstory** - Midjourney launches a new division called Midjourney Medical, focused on a full-body ultrasound scanner. The segment begins with the history of founder David Holz.
- 3 (08:15) **Midjourney’s Financial Position & Hardware Ambitions** - The hosts speculate on the company’s cash flow, potentially from a massive Meta deal, allowing big swings like this medical hardware.
- 4 (09:25) **Midjourney Medical Launch Event & Demo** - Tyler, who attended the event, describes the vibe: warm lighting, large fake machine tubes, and a smaller demo unit for hands-on experience.
- 5 (15:40) **Scanner Mechanics & Future Vision** - The scanner moves the patient through a ring, capturing hundreds of slices in 60 seconds, processed by 21 servers with two petaflops of compute.
- 6 (18:32) **Reactions to Midjourney Medical** - The hosts read and react to online commentary, noting the freedom a bootstrapped company has to take such bold bets.
- 7 (19:55) **Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI** - Legendary AI researcher Noam Shazeer (co-author of the Transformer paper, sparse MOE pioneer, former VP of Engineering at Google DeepMind) leaves Google to join OpenAI.
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Guests on this episode
Show Notes
Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with each episode posted to podcast platforms right after.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella.
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