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Welcome to the podcast. Today, Midjourney is pivoting to hardware. They've created a full body ultrasound scanner. This is one of the biggest AI pivots I think I have seen since the start of the AI wave. I'm excited to get into that. Anthropic's federal ban is becoming a bit of a marketing asset for it. Maybe this isn't such a bad thing. At the same time, Amazon's mgm, they are dropping Luca Guardrino's Sam Altman film called Artificial. We're going to tell you a little bit about the drama behind why that's happening. And at the same time, AWS is in talks right now to sell their Trainium chips to outside buyers. So before it was kind of just inside of aws. Now they're going to be selling them to outside buyers. This is directly competing with Nvidia Intel. Another person in the chip space has jumped 9%. Their stock is up after Trump announced that Apple had a chip design deal with them. We're going to get into all of the details with that. 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This is something that has helped me a ton. If you've, you know, if you've been using Claude lately, you know that it's incredibly capable. It can control your computer screen, it can do anything, but it cannot generate images, audio and video like other competitors can. So it's not just those three capabilities. You also get access to over 80 different AI models and, and you can use that same MCP inside of ChatGPT. You can use it Inside of Gemini, all of the different models and agents that you use, you can port this full library of AI models into them with the AI box MCP. So it's $7 and or $8.99 a month. There's a link in the description. You can go check that out if you want. AI box, AI slash, mcp. I would love for you to try it. I hope this unlocks a ton of incredible creativity for you. Let's continue with the episode. So let's kick it off with Mid Journey. They have launched their very first hardware product. This is something I wasn't expecting when I opened up tw Twitter yesterday or X yesterday. It is a full body ultrasound scanner. It's going to capture detailed images in 60 seconds. So it's using 40 semiconductor transducers and two petaflops of compute. The company is planning to open a spa in San Francisco's Union Square that is going to have 100 scanners, is all going to be next year 2027. And they are positioning this as preventative health tool that could rival MRI quality with, without radiation or hospital logistics. Okay, this is just like coming from the company that was previously doing AI generated images. Absolutely not something I was expecting. But if you go look up like pictures of this thing, it's incredible. There's all of these tiny microscopic speakers basically that are blasting little sounds at you. In order to get this full body scan, you actually have to go into a vat of water. So you walk into a vat of water, you're surrounded by all these tiny little speakers that are blasting at you. And it can get every single nanoparticle of, of your whole body scanned. And it's pretty impressive because it's not just externally, it's internally. So it's able to scan your lungs, all of your organs. It's really, really incredible. And you can do the whole thing in 60 seconds. So if you've done an MRI scan before, you know you're super claustrophobic, you can't move, you're in this giant tube. You have to wear a lead vest for radiation. This is very cool. So the way this whole thing works is that AI is going to handle the 3D reconstruction of muscle, fat, bone and organs. So basically it, you know, it's going to be fed back all of these basically like bat echolocation sonar, sound bounce detection that it's done. And then the AI is going to put that back together and decode this into a way that shows a full 3D reconstruction of your Whole body. About a dozen people have been scanned. So far, Mid Journey hasn't published any kind of comparative imaging data against MRI baselines. And the company is actually not going to go do FDA diagnostic clearance. They're actually going to start with body composition maps. This is a much lower regulatory category. They're also kind of floating the idea of a new FDA device class for consumer health tracking. So it's not like something that's like, hey, go, go in this thing and it's going to diagnose if you have any issues. They're more like, hey, this is for preventative. This is for giving you information. It's kind of just like a body tracker. Just because FDA takes so long. But this is really incredible. Basically, Midjourney is betting that this kind of real time full body imaging is going to become in a consumer wellness staple rather than a clinical tool. So the way that they're thinking about this is that gym memberships are going to be able to put this in spas, et cetera. And their goal is to build 50,000 of these that they put around the world. And because you can do the whole scan in 60 seconds instead of, you know, hours in the MRI scan, their goal is that the whole world could be able to get full body, high quality scans, internal, external, in 60 seconds with just 50,000 of these. So very cool, very bullish, you know, huge congratulations, the whole team over at Midjourney for doing something so focused on health that is so productive to humanity beyond just generating AI images, which is what they're famous for. Okay, let's talk about Anthropic's federal ban. Some people are saying this is becoming a bit of a marketing asset because the US government forced them to pull their newest model, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, last week. And this is all after Amazon researchers found that there was some jailbreak vulnerabilities. And apparently Anthropic said, hey, look, why do we have to fix these jailbreaks? Because you can do the same jailbreaks on chat GBT 5.5. So it, you know, they're like, why are you targeting us? And there was kind of this whole back and forth and the government's like, well, there's a jailbreak. And you said this was super dangerous, so we got to pull it. Sa. Now something people think this is really bad for Anthropic. But over at TechCrunch, the PO, the hosts of their equity podcast, said that this incident has positioned Anthropic at the center of AI policy and this debate that is Happening this week was done without the company spending any marketing dollars. They're saying, look, it's actually making Anthropic look like they're, you know, they're, they're fighting the government. And beyond that, it shows them as number one, a strong company. But if they're getting, you know, kind of signaled out by the government for what could be an industry wide problem that might actually strengthen their pre IPO narrative because investors are saying, look, there's something different about Anthropic. They're stronger or they're better and they're being targeted because their AI models are so much better than ChatGPT and anyone else's. So we'll see I how the, how the chips fall with that if it's actually benefiting their company or not. Okay. Amazon's MGM is dropping the new Sam Altman film Artificial. This was created by Luca Guadino and the film is basically dramatizing Sam Altman's five day firing and reinstatement as OpenAI CEO. This all happened back in like November 2023. I know it seems like a million years ago, but it wasn't that long ago. They made a whole movie about it. But Amazon doesn't want to distribute it anymore and so they're actually shopping for new distributors. This is coming just a few weeks after Amazon announced a $50 billion investment in OpenAI, which is kind of a weird conflict between, you know, the studio's parent company and also depicting OpenAI's internal crisis. So it's almost like, look, they're putting $50 billion into OpenAI. Maybe they don't want to be the people that distribute a video that might not put Sam Altman in the best light. So that's gonna be interesting to see who else picks that up. I think we all wanna see the film. Come on. We all have to live through the drama wondering what was gonna happen. We all wanna see the movie whether it's good or not. I love these types of movies. I love the one they made about Uber, I love the one they made about BlackBerry. I love all of these kind of like Silicon Valley insider movies. I know they're not all perfect. The we Crashed one was phenomenal. Highly recommend it. Apparently Andrew Garfield is playing Altman. The thing that I'm happy about is that the film is far enough along that they're just shopping, sending this to a different distributor and they're not canceling it out altogether. It's basically near finished of a product. So I think they just have some editing and st. But I think it's mostly all been filmed and shot, which I'm excited to see what it actually looks like. Okay, AWS is in open talks. More Amazonish news to sell Trainium chips outside of just being built inside of aws. So they're actually going and targeting outside buyers. This is something that Nvidia is probably feeling particularly threatened by. The AWS CEO Andy Jassy, he pegged the chips business at about $50 billion annual run rate, which is enough to rival Intel's revenue and create the first credible alternative to Nvidia for AI training silicon. I mean that's pretty wild for them to be like, hey look, we have this new chip, we've been using it internally and we think this thing is worth, you know, the entire company of Intel Trainium 4 capability is already completely sold out, which is more than a year before this chip is actually shipping. And they've completely sold it out a year ahead of time. That I think has forced Amazon to choose between serving AWS customers or external buyers. Amazon is going to need to secure basically additional capacity from tsmc, which is currently dominated by Nvidia orders and has become Apple's replacement at the foundry's largest customer. Nvidia is simultaneously expanding into a 200 billion CPU for AI market, which is pushing into intel and AMD territory. So it's kind of interesting because we have Amazon moving into Nvidia's territory. We have Nvidia moving into intel and AMD's territory. The reason why I think this matters and why it's particularly interesting to me is because right now we have kind of this hyperscaler supply crunch and it's in a way it's actually forcing Amazon's hand because if they sell their Trainium externally, it's going to sacrifice this kind of a bundled cloud revenue that Amazon makes when it owns the full stack. So they have this kind of bundled revenue when they're selling it inside of aws. But you know, for every single chip that they sell or every single chip that they ship, it's a five year revenue stream lost, right? Because if they had taken this Trainium, they put it in their own data center and then they sold it to people, they would be able to keep using that chip for five years and selling it it's usage to people kind of renting it out, right? Instead if they go and sell that chip to someone, it's a one off deal. But right now the reason that Amazon is doing this is because if they don't do, you know, kind of Sell at one off when there's this massive demand. They're basically leaving billions of dollars on the table because there's certain customers that are not going to rent servers from Amazon. They're going to go buy them, they're gonna try to get them from Nvidia, but they're gonna try to purchase them for themselves one way or another. So Amazon's like, look, let's try to make some money here. They're kind of trying to bet that this is a good Nvidia alternative that people are going to be interested because this is backed by $50 billion business. And I think right now that is, you know, meaning a lot more to them than kind of the short term cloud business bundle losses that they might be missing out on. Okay, into more chip news. Intel's Stock has jumped 9% after Trump announced an Apple chips design deal that's going to be happening. This, you know, bumped them up and in pre market trading. The move I think shows that there is a major shift in semiconductor manufacturing. Pulling Apple away from Taiwan and marking Intel's biggest foundry win since their CEO, the new one lit Bhutan refocused the company on some outside partnerships. So their Stock has gained 464% over the last 12 months. If you guys remember, intel stock has been sliding for many, many years. This is lifting their market cap to $608 billion a bid. A much broader 90% year to date rally in the semiconductor sector. Elon Musk's Terrafab, also described as basically the world's largest chip factory, is being designed with Intel's technology team, which is the first major outside foundry commitment for Intel's capital, varied capital intensive manufacturing business. And Apple currently designs all of its own M Series and A series chips and they have a fabrication unit and all that is done in Taiwan, which means that any meaningful volume shift to intel is going to be the company's most significant outsourced order to date. The reason why I think this is a big deal is because intel has gone from manufacturing and they've kind of been, they're turning into sort of a geopolitical asset in the last 12 months. The Apple deal, if it includes real volume, is going to validate what the CEO has been betting on, that US foundry capacity, which is of course backed by government capital and a lot of President, you know, President Trump's attention. They're saying that this can compete with Taiwan. And so I think if we kind of watch whether this is going to open up the floodgates for other design wins or if this is going to kind of be like a one off political kind of like moment where Trump just wanted to make a big announcement and so we kind of got this deal put together. I think that's remaining to be seen. But overall I'm excited to see this American company succeed moving some manufacturing to the United States and I think this is great for diversifying our supply chain overall. So we'll see what happens there. Thank you so much for tuning into the podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to leave a rating review wherever you get your podcasts and I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day. I will leave a link in the description to AI box AI if you want to add image, audio and video models all into Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT all with the AI box MCP, there's a link in the description. I would love to have you try it out and hope that unlocks a lot of capabilities for you for only 8.99amonth. All right, catch you all in the next episode.
Host: AI News
Air Date: June 19, 2026
This episode focuses on groundbreaking developments across the AI and tech industries, with a spotlight on Midjourney's unexpected pivot from AI image generation to hardware: the release of a full body AI-powered ultrasound scanner. Additionally, it covers major news involving Anthropic’s federal ban and its impact on the company’s image, Amazon’s chip strategy, and a high-profile Apple-Intel chip deal. The host (A) provides breakdowns, context, and personal takes throughout.
[03:30–09:45]
Surprise Pivot:
Midjourney, previously famed for AI-generated imagery, shocked the tech world by launching their first hardware product: a full body ultrasound scanner.
Technical Details:
Market and Regulatory Approach:
Deployment Plans:
Notable Quotes:
[09:50–13:00]
Incident Overview:
Anthropic had to pull its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models after the US government mandated action due to “jailbreak vulnerabilities” unearthed by Amazon researchers. Anthropic countered that the same issues exist in ChatGPT 5.5.
Narrative Shift:
The host references TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, noting that the ban “has positioned Anthropic at the center of AI policy” (A, 11:22) and gave them massive time in the spotlight for free.
Impact:
The incident could actually be “strengthening their pre IPO narrative” (A, 12:16).
[13:10–15:00]
Film Details:
The movie—directed by Luca Guadino and starring Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman—dramatizes Altman’s temporary firing and return as OpenAI CEO in 2023.
Conflict and Fallout:
Amazon’s $50B investment in OpenAI may conflict with distributing a film depicting its internal crisis. MGM (an Amazon subsidiary) has dropped the film and is seeking new distributors.
Cultural Commentary:
The host expresses excitement for these “Silicon Valley insider movies,” citing examples such as WeCrashed, BlackBerry, and Super Pumped.
[15:02–18:40]
Strategic Shift:
AWS will sell its proprietary Trainium AI chips to external buyers, directly challenging Nvidia and Intel in the AI hardware space.
Market Dynamics:
Business Tension:
Selling chips externally sacrifices lucrative 5-year usage revenues from AWS server rentals but opens new revenue streams during a market shortage.
[18:45–22:35]
News Highlights:
Industry Impact:
Geopolitical and Supply Chain Implications:
On Midjourney’s Hardware Pivot:
“This is just like coming from the company that was previously doing AI generated images. Absolutely not something I was expecting.” (A, 04:58)
On Anthropic’s Federal Ban:
“Some people are saying this is becoming a bit of a marketing asset because the US government forced them to pull their newest model…” (A, 10:11)
On Amazon Dropping the OpenAI Film:
“It wasn’t that long ago… They made a whole movie about it. But Amazon doesn’t want to distribute it anymore.” (A, 13:19)
“I love all of these kind of like Silicon Valley insider movies. I know they’re not all perfect. The We Crashed one was phenomenal. Highly recommend it.” (A, 14:07)
On Intel’s Comeback:
“Intel has gone from manufacturing and they've kind of been, they're turning into sort of a geopolitical asset in the last 12 months.” (A, 21:00)
“Overall I'm excited to see this American company succeed, moving some manufacturing to the United States and I think this is great for diversifying our supply chain overall.” (A, 22:28)
This episode is rich with industry-shaking news: Midjourney’s leap into health-tech hardware could redefine preventative medicine; Anthropic’s regulatory battle may actually boost its IPO narrative; Amazon is making bold moves both in AI hardware and in media; and Intel’s deal with Apple signals a potential geopolitical rebalancing in semiconductor manufacturing. The host’s commentary is energetic, informed, and peppered with industry anecdotes, making the episode genuinely useful for anyone following the intersection of AI, health tech, chips, and tech industry drama.