#078

Midjourney built a body scanner for spas, OpenAI paid Microsoft more than it earned

Midjourney pivots to hardware with 8,960 transducers and no FDA approval. OpenAI burned $34B and paid Microsoft more than its $13B revenue. Cursor ate Continue.

Midjourney, the AI image generator, just announced a full-body ultrasonic scanner. The first unit goes into a San Francisco spa next to hot tubs and cold plunges. No FDA approval, no clinical trials, no peer-reviewed validation.

David Holz calls it “a genuinely nice experience, not a going to the doctor experience.” A radiologist on HN already called the imaging quality worse than standard ultrasound. The gap between the ambition and the evidence is the whole story.

In today’s indie hacker news:

  • 🏥 Midjourney pivots to hardware: body scanner, spa, no FDA approval
  • 💸 OpenAI burned $34B in 2025, paid Microsoft more than its own revenue
  • 🤖 11 LLMs in a battle royale: Grok won 43%, Claude kept asking for truces
  • 🔒 Cursor acquires Continue.dev, repo goes read-only
  • 🏗️ Epic open-sources Lore, the VCS that runs Fortnite

TOP STORIES

FROM PIXELS TO ULTRASOUND

🏥 Midjourney pivots to hardware: full-body scanner, wellness spa, zero FDA approval

Midjourney pivots to hardware: full-body scanner, wellness spa, zero FDA approval

The story: Midjourney announced Midjourney Medical, a new division building the “Midjourney Scanner,” a full-body “Ultrasonic CT” that uses only sound and water to scan you in 60 seconds. No radiation, no magnetic fields. The company signed a $65M, five-year co-development deal with Butterfly Network in November 2025 to license their Ultrasound-on-Chip modules. First deployment: a San Francisco spa opening end of 2027 with 9-10 scanners alongside saunas and cold plunges.

The details:

Why builders care: The playbook is worth studying regardless of whether the scanner works. Midjourney licensed existing chip tech instead of building a fab, then used the wellness/spa framing to sidestep FDA medical device classification at launch. Start as “body composition maps,” build the data flywheel, apply for clinical clearance later. It’s the Apple Watch ECG strategy applied to full-body imaging.

YOUR API PRICES ARE SUBSIDIZED

💸 Leaked financials: OpenAI burned $34B in 2025 on $13B revenue, paid Microsoft $17.2B

Leaked financials: OpenAI burned $34B in 2025 on $13B revenue, paid Microsoft $17.2B

The story: Journalist Ed Zitron obtained OpenAI’s 2025 audited financials, independently verified by the Financial Times. Revenue tripled to $13.07B. Total costs: $34 billion. The headline GAAP net loss was $38.53B, but roughly $30B stems from a one-time non-cash charge tied to the nonprofit conversion. Adjusted operating loss: about $8 billion in real cash burn.

The details:

Why builders care: Every dollar you spend on the OpenAI API is currently below true cost. Before the IPO, that’s venture-subsidized growth. After the IPO, shareholders want margins. If your unit economics depend on cheap frontier inference, build in a model-switching layer now.

THE ALIGNMENT TAX HAS A PRICE TAG

🤖 OpenRouter drops 11 LLMs into a battle royale: Grok won 43% of games, Claude kept asking for truces

OpenRouter drops 11 LLMs into a battle royale: Grok won 43% of games, Claude kept asking for truces

The story: Jacky Liang at OpenRouter built a 2D battle royale and dropped 11 LLMs into it. Models fought on a randomized map with weapons, vehicles, and a shrinking zone. Between matches, each model could edit its own strategy files. Full replay viewer is live.

The details:

  • Grok 4.1 Fast won 13 of 30 games (43%) at $0.97 per win. Total spend across the full run: $12.57
  • Claude Sonnet 4.6 came 4th with 5 wins at $26.78 per win, 27.7x more expensive per win than Grok
  • Claude recorded 7 games with zero kills, 8 zone-caused deaths, and asked for truces more than any other model
  • GPT 5.4 scored 38 kills (most in the lineup) but only 2 wins. Most lethal, worst strategy.
  • Three models spent $57.15 combined and won zero games

Why builders care: This is cost-per-outcome benchmarking, not cost-per-token. If your agent needs to be cooperative (customer support, medical triage), the alignment tax is a feature. If it needs to win zero-sum tasks (competitive pricing, negotiation bots), that same tax is a direct liability. The open-source repo makes this a replicable methodology.

THE LAST NEUTRAL AGENT GETS ABSORBED

🔒 Cursor acquires Continue.dev, the open-source coding agent goes read-only

Cursor acquires Continue.dev, the open-source coding agent goes read-only

The story: Continue.dev announced its acquisition by Cursor, which SpaceX bought for $60B two days earlier. The GitHub repo is now read-only. v2.0.0 is the final release, with telemetry removed and auth stripped. The codebase stays Apache 2.0.

The details:

Why builders care: If you depend on Continue, pin to v2.0.0 or fork now. No security patches or model updates are coming from the original team. The broader signal: the “BYO-LLM” neutrality play didn’t prevent absorption. Aider and Cline are the remaining major neutral alternatives.

GIT CAN’T DO THIS

🏗️ Epic open-sources Lore, the Rust-built VCS designed for terabyte-scale game binaries

Epic open-sources Lore, the Rust-built VCS designed for terabyte-scale game binaries

The story: Epic Games open-sourced Lore under the MIT license. Originally built as “Unreal Revision Control” for Fortnite, Lore is a VCS written in Rust with BLAKE3 content addressing and first-class support for multi-terabyte binary repos.

The details:

  • 48-byte content addresses (BLAKE3 hash + context tag) track file identity across moves and copies
  • Dual chunking: Content-Defined for dedup, Fixed-Size for canonical addressing
  • SDKs in six languages (JS, Python, C#, Go, C/C++, Rust). Offline by default: staging, branching, and diffing never need a network round trip

Why builders care: If you work with large binaries, whether game assets, AI model weights, or multimedia, Lore eliminates the Perforce per-seat licensing tax and Git LFS’s sharp edges. The MIT license means you can fork it, self-host it, or build commercial tooling on top.

🔄 Token efficiency race heats up - Parcle.ai claims 60%+ token savings in agentic workflows by removing repeated context. Separately, GitHub cut token costs in Copilot by 62% by pruning unused MCP tools and optimizing model routing. If you’re running agent loops, context pruning is the fastest cost lever.

🧠 Noam Shazeer leaves Google for OpenAI - The “Attention Is All You Need” co-author and Gemini co-lead just joined OpenAI. Google paid $2.7B to bring him back from Character.AI less than two years ago. The transformer’s co-inventor now builds for the company that commercialized transformers first.

🔧 Tiny models and local tooling keep shipping - Inflect-Nano ships a 4.63M-parameter TTS model. llama.cpp adds a model management API with dynamic multi-model loading, LRU eviction, and HuggingFace Hub integration. The local inference stack gets more turnkey every week.

DRAMA

YOUR CAR DOESN’T TRUST YOUR OS

Volkswagen blocks GrapheneOS users from its app - VW’s app refuses to run on GrapheneOS, locking privacy-focused Android users out of remote vehicle controls. GrapheneOS is hardened Android with better security than stock. VW is penalizing users for caring more about security than VW does. Trending on HN.

FIRST DOLLAR

LAUNCH DAY CONVERTS

u/Fancy-Remove4078 on r/SaaS landed 7 paid customers on launch day for an AI-powered mobile app design tool, now at 15 paying users. The channel: consistent posting on X with demo videos. No pricing disclosed, but the thread has genuine back-and-forth on churn, ICP targeting, and when to raise prices. The lesson is the simplest one in distribution: show the product working, repeatedly, where your buyers already scroll.

STACK OF THE DAY

Draft - Open-source agent context sync and collaboration. If you’re running multiple AI coding agents on the same project, Draft keeps their context aligned so they don’t step on each other’s work. Think shared memory for multi-agent dev workflows. Free, MIT licensed.

Not sponsored. We just feature tools builders would actually use.

BOOKMARKED TODAY

  • 📋 RFC 10008: HTTP QUERY method - A new HTTP method for safe, idempotent requests with a body. GET but with a request body, finally standardized. If you’ve been encoding complex filters in query strings, this is the clean alternative.
  • 🛠️ Brevio: 184 free browser tools - PDF conversion, image editing, dev utilities, and AI tasks. All client-side, no upload required. Show HN post with traction on HN.
  • 🏗️ Adam (YC W25): open-source AI CAD - YC-backed open-source CAD with AI assistance. If you build hardware or physical products, worth a bookmark. Launch HN.

Curated by AI, built by a human.