With this, Holz understated the expansiveness of the land...

Todd Smith

·last week

shared a link post in group #Gadgetsvia#Biohackers Connect

With this, Holz understated the expansiveness of the landscape around #Artificial Intelligence hardware. There’s a lot going on. OpenAI is working on a Jony Ive–designed smart speaker (https://www.theinformatio..) , which it expects to unveil later this year. Meta Platforms’ smartglasses from Ray-Ban and Oakley are equipped with its AI. Beyond eyewear, Meta is developing an AI-powered pendant (https://www.theinformatio..), while Apple is focused on a wearable pin (https://www.theinformatio..) expected in 2027 or later. And there are plenty of smaller startups such as Midjourney that are working on AI products, like Opal, which is creating a mysterious AI audio #Gadgets (https://www.wired.com/sto.. backing from OpenAI, and Hark, the new startup from Figure AI founder Brett Adcock, which is working on some bespoke physical hardware. (Adcock hasn’t yet revealed exactly what.) 
 
There are also numerous companies vying to make the perfect robot companion capable of washing dishes and folding laundry. That includes 1X Technologies, the Palo Alto, Calif.–based startup behind NEO (https://www.1x.tech/neo), a slightly creepy humanoid, and Sunday, which has raised $200 million to create the cartoonishly cute Memo (https://www.youtube.com/w..). 1X is taking orders for its $20,000 robot, while Sunday is looking for beta testers. #Robotics Revolution 🦾🤖🦿 

But no one has really gotten a breakthrough hit yet. Humane, a startup that raised more than $230 million to create a wearable AI pin, shut down in 2025 and sold its intellectual property to HP for about half that sum. Meanwhile, Friend, a San Francisco startup that created an AI necklace, became famous not for its product but for its widely mocked marketing campaigns. And a day before Midjourney’s big party, Evan Spiegel unveiled his long-awaited Specs (https://x.com/AutismCapit.. ), augmented reality glasses that come with an AI feature. They were met with almost as much derision as the Humane pin and the Friend device, and Snap shares ended the week down 13%. (The memes were great, though.)

Still, many investors are excited about what they see in all those devices and think someone will finally land on something people do like. “A thousand flowers will bloom in this area because it’s such a big prize and there are so many ways of attacking it,” said Aaref Hilaly, a partner at Bain Capital Ventures who led the firm’s investment in Sunday, the home robot startup. 

It’s hard to predict whether Midjourney’s scanner will end up as a hardware hit. Holz, whom I profiled in a Big Read earlier this year, has an impressive history of creating beloved products—from Midjourney’s AI image generator, which still generates at least $200 million in annual revenue, to the gesture-tracking device sold by his first startup, Leap Motion. He’s long wanted to create another hardware product, and he described Midjourney as the cash cow that can fund his moon-shot projects. 

Still, Holz’s ambitions are, well, ambitious.  https://www.theinformatio.. 

Eventually, he hopes the devices will be widely available to doctors, and he boldly predicted they could eliminate around half of all medical costs by helping with early disease detection. But there will be a long path toward winning the FDA’s sign-off before that can happen, a fact he admitted at the party after an attendee asked him about the slog toward regulatory approval.

I felt impressed by the scale of Holz’s vision but a little skeptical. How transformative is this technology really? And is an AI lab the one to build it? But before Holz even finished his talk, about a quarter of the room had left to try demos of the technology, dunking their fists into tanks of water while lab coat–clad Midjourney staff watched. Even if he can’t convince everyone, Silicon Valley certainly seems ready for a spa day.

www.theinformation.com

Midjourney Is Profitable and Chasing Hardware Dreams. But Can It Survive Google?

Over much of the past year, David Holz, the 37-year-old founder of Midjourney, has devoted himself to a single task: reassuring fans of his AI image-making tool that a new, significant update—version 8—would indeed arrive soon. Initially, Holz said it might come at the end of 2025. That date ...

Todd Smith

·last week

shared a link post in group #Gadgetsvia#Biohackers Connect

With this, Holz understated the expansiveness of the landscape around #Artificial Intelligence hardware. There’s a lot going on. OpenAI is working on a Jony Ive–designed smart speaker (https://www.theinformatio..) , which it expects to unveil later this year. Meta Platforms’ smartglasses from Ray-Ban and Oakley are equipped with its AI. Beyond eyewear, Meta is developing an AI-powered pendant (https://www.theinformatio..), while Apple is focused on a wearable pin (https://www.theinformatio..) expected in 2027 or later. And there are plenty of smaller startups such as Midjourney that are working on AI products, like Opal, which is creating a mysterious AI audio #Gadgets (https://www.wired.com/sto.. backing from OpenAI, and Hark, the new startup from Figure AI founder Brett Adcock, which is working on some bespoke physical hardware. (Adcock hasn’t yet revealed exactly what.) 
 
There are also numerous companies vying to make the perfect robot companion capable of washing dishes and folding laundry. That includes 1X Technologies, the Palo Alto, Calif.–based startup behind NEO (https://www.1x.tech/neo), a slightly creepy humanoid, and Sunday, which has raised $200 million to create the cartoonishly cute Memo (https://www.youtube.com/w..). 1X is taking orders for its $20,000 robot, while Sunday is looking for beta testers. #Robotics Revolution 🦾🤖🦿 

But no one has really gotten a breakthrough hit yet. Humane, a startup that raised more than $230 million to create a wearable AI pin, shut down in 2025 and sold its intellectual property to HP for about half that sum. Meanwhile, Friend, a San Francisco startup that created an AI necklace, became famous not for its product but for its widely mocked marketing campaigns. And a day before Midjourney’s big party, Evan Spiegel unveiled his long-awaited Specs (https://x.com/AutismCapit.. ), augmented reality glasses that come with an AI feature. They were met with almost as much derision as the Humane pin and the Friend device, and Snap shares ended the week down 13%. (The memes were great, though.)

Still, many investors are excited about what they see in all those devices and think someone will finally land on something people do like. “A thousand flowers will bloom in this area because it’s such a big prize and there are so many ways of attacking it,” said Aaref Hilaly, a partner at Bain Capital Ventures who led the firm’s investment in Sunday, the home robot startup. 

It’s hard to predict whether Midjourney’s scanner will end up as a hardware hit. Holz, whom I profiled in a Big Read earlier this year, has an impressive history of creating beloved products—from Midjourney’s AI image generator, which still generates at least $200 million in annual revenue, to the gesture-tracking device sold by his first startup, Leap Motion. He’s long wanted to create another hardware product, and he described Midjourney as the cash cow that can fund his moon-shot projects. 

Still, Holz’s ambitions are, well, ambitious.  https://www.theinformatio.. 

Eventually, he hopes the devices will be widely available to doctors, and he boldly predicted they could eliminate around half of all medical costs by helping with early disease detection. But there will be a long path toward winning the FDA’s sign-off before that can happen, a fact he admitted at the party after an attendee asked him about the slog toward regulatory approval.

I felt impressed by the scale of Holz’s vision but a little skeptical. How transformative is this technology really? And is an AI lab the one to build it? But before Holz even finished his talk, about a quarter of the room had left to try demos of the technology, dunking their fists into tanks of water while lab coat–clad Midjourney staff watched. Even if he can’t convince everyone, Silicon Valley certainly seems ready for a spa day.

www.theinformation.com