[fastball]

That is a pretty wild disparagement this early. A Theranos situation is one where fraud has been committed. Theranos itself would not have been a "Theranos situation" if, after making initial bold claims ("we're gonna do a full blood panel with a drop of your blood"), they had tried to make it work, failed, and then been upfront about that. But they committed fraud and the rest is history.

With regards to Midjourney Scanner, you have no evidence that any fraud is happening or is likely to happen with this device. AFAIK they haven't actually made strong claims about what this will be capable of in a medical context, so fraud would be quite hard at this stage anyway. As such, it seems unreasonable to expect them to already have done studies with doctors.

[jgon]

Right, but also a big part of the "Theranos situation" was a tech company coming out and saying "We've got this revolutionary medical technology that the multi-hundred billion dollar medical industry has overlooked but which a non-domain expert undergrad has been able to innovate", and then a bunch of people, crucially many people with domain experience said stuff like "this is likely fraud, testing companies have all tried to make pin-prick blood sampling work but the volumes are just way too low to get anything reliable out of them, these companies employ PHDs who've all spent decades trying to make testing better and more affordable because there's a lot of money at stake".

Those people generally got shouted down when Theranos was still the hot story in SV, and of course after everything came out suddenly everyone knew it was fishy all along, which is just absolute bullshit. I remember reading comments here on HN suggesting that people saying Theranos was fraud were motivated by misogyny, just absolutely infuriating stuff.

So now we have an AI company coming out with promises of a revolutionary leap forward in medical imaging, in terms of cost and information gathered, and they're not using some sort of revolutionary sensor that they've invented, all the "hard" engineering has been done by other companies that have been in this game for decades at this point and how have R&D staffs with deep knowledge and expertise, but who somehow lack the ability to take the next step, they're coming in with the software and automated interpretation, which is basically the "?" step in the underpants gnome business plan.

The real truth about stuff in the biology and the medical world is that its all insanely hard due to the complexity of the systems involved, and there are tons of skilled and smart people who dedicate their careers to moving this stuff forward. There are really no low-hanging fruits being ignored by "the establishment" waiting for an outsider AI company to come in and overturn the table. Progress is basically won by sweating it out at the lab bench and accumulating a bunch of hard-fought incremental wins over a decade or so. Its frustrating that Elizabeth Holmes is still in jail and yet we're all here forgetting every lesson we should have learned from the previous go-round.

[fastball]

There are very clearly capabilities in medical tech that have not been fully explored due to compute/cost constraints and gaps in innovation. "Really smart PhDs have worked on this and come up with nothing" is a very unconvincing argument – you could say that about huge swathes of technological development.

Very smart people were trying and failing to effectively split the atom before some very well-funded and well-placed individuals made it happen. Loads of very smart people were working on AI before Transformers were developed and made LLMs viable / intelligent enough for real work. People trying and failing to do something hard doesn't mean it is impossible, it just means they've found 10,000 ways to not make a lightbulb.