Midjourney uses $500M revenue to go into medical imaging, Snap launches $2000 glasses, Taste Labs raises $18.5M

In this episode of Get the Check, the hosts break down three big stories: Midjourney's surprise pivot into medical body scanning, Snap's sixth attempt at AR glasses, and Taste Labs, the $18.5M seed-funded startup trying to bring ~taste~ to AI.

They start with Midjourney. The AI image generation company, which is bootstrapped and at $500M ARR with only 163 employees, just announced a full-body imaging system that uses sound waves instead of radiation to produce 3D models of your organs. The underlying hardware comes from Butterfly Network, a public company that put palm-sized ultrasound tech onto a single semiconductor chip. Midjourney's flagship location is going to be a 25K sq ft spa in Union Square with hot tubs, saunas, and cold plunges. Priya and Maya are for sure going. The pod digs into the med spa math: Body Spec's Marina location runs scans every five minutes, eight hours a day, across two machines, pulling $2.5–3M in revenue with three employees and a tiny lease. The pod also dives into the controversies around the launch, including what false positives might mean at scale. Roughly 15 to 30% of healthy people scanned by imaging devices can show abnormalities that trigger follow-up testing and surgeries. Also, it's unclear if Midjourney is trying to position this as equal to an MRI, but Maya says she doesn’t think they are. Maya’s hot take is no one has mapped how human bodies degrade over time and this could change that.

Next, Snap Spectacles. It's generation six of the AR glasses Evan Spiegel has been pushing for over a decade, and investors are not having it. The stock dropped 10% on the news. At $2,195 it’s unclear who the target audience is. The pod dives into why the glasses actually are technically impressive (just not commercially).

Finally, Taste Labs, which you probably saw launch on X this week. The startup raised $18.5M to build what is essentially a design evaluation and data labeling business, hiring people with good taste to annotate AI outputs so models learn aesthetic judgment. They all met the founder at a dinner once and think the hate on X is overblown and too philosophical to be relevant to the clear need for a design eval product. The pod thinks Taste helped train Anthropic's Mythos model (the Fable 5 aesthetic is too similar to the Taste Labs launch screenshots to be a coincidence).

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00:00 Maya forgets her laptop

07:30 Midjourney's medical pivot

11:02 Ultrasound vs. MRI vs. CT explained

14:09 Why some doctors have concerns about the tech

22:18 We might need to open a Med Spa

25:41 The data on human health this could unlock

27:49 A billion people still use Snapchat?

30:02 Advertisers hate Snap

33:30 Investors are over Evan Spiegel, but he's trying to go founder mode

34:14 Snap Spectacles gen 6: everything you need to know

37:33 Is Snap trying to compete with the iPhone

38:42 Why AR glasses make you motion sick (your brain thinks it's poisoned)

41:47 Taste Labs raised $18.5M to end AI slop

48:12 Did they help train Anthropic's Mythos model

54:20 Why does tech suddenly care about taste`