Midjourney Goes Medical, the AI Talent War, and the Cult of Self-Optimization

David Holz, the founder of Midjourney, has a pattern: he builds hardware that seems impossible, watches it struggle, and then pivots into something that changes the world. His first company, Leap Motion, brought hand tracking to VR in the early 2010s using deep neural nets years before that was common. It was technically impressive but never reached mass adoption. Apple tried to buy the company twice; the deal fell through both times. Holz kept building.

Then came Midjourney. The AI image generator broke every rule: no venture funding, no website, no app — just a Discord server that grew to millions of members. Holz's insight was that showing someone a blank box and saying "generate anything" produces boring results. People type "dog" and get a picture of a dog. The magic is in the weird prompts — "astronaut riding a horse on the moon" — things that don't exist and would require a Hollywood CGI budget to create. By generating four candidate images per prompt and letting users pick favorites, Midjourney built a data flywheel that competitors like Stable Diffusion couldn't match because they ran locally and open-source.