Hello, AI Explorer!
Good Saturday. This week: Gemini's co-lead just left for OpenAI. Midjourney just built a 60-second full-body scanner that skips the MRI entirely & more.
Welcome back to your weekly AI digest: human-curated, zero fluff.
Every Wednesday and Saturday, we bring you:
- The week's most important AI developments (no fluff)
- Hand-picked AI tools actually worth your time
- Expert insights on what these changes mean for you
Let's dive into this week's discoveries! ⚡
🔥 This Week in AI
🔥 This Week in AI |
June 20, 2026 |
| 🩺 | Midjourney built a 60-second full-body ultrasound scanner, no MRI needed |
| 🧠 | Gemini's co-lead Noam Shazeer leaves Google for OpenAI |
| 💸 | Tim Cook says AI-driven chip costs make iPhone price hikes "unavoidable" |
| 🎬 | Adobe's AI agent now lives inside Photoshop, Premiere, and ChatGPT itself |
| 🌍 | Anthropic, DeepMind, and OpenAI chiefs pitch G7 leaders on who governs AI |
| 👟 | Allbirds rebrands to Smartbird, pivots from sneakers to AI data centers |
| 👓 | XREAL's new Gemini-powered glasses ship this fall for under $1,500 |
| 🔮 | Kurzweil still says human-level AI lands by 2029, no matter what Musk predicts |
| ⚔️ | Pentagon confirms its Grok-based AI helped target strikes inside Iran |
| ⚡ | 4 AI Tools This Week: PDFelement, Otterly.ai, Murf, Shortwave -- all inside. |
MIDJOURNEY
| 🩺 |
Midjourney Built an AI Body Scanner That Skips the MRI |
Midjourney is best known for AI art, but on June 17 it unveiled the Midjourney Scanner, a full-body ultrasound device the company calls "Ultrasonic CT." Step onto the platform, get submerged in water moving roughly 2 inches per second, and pass through a ring of half a million tiny ultrasonic emitters.
The scan takes about 60 seconds and produces a 3D body map accurate to a fraction of a millimeter, built on hardware from Butterfly Network. Midjourney wants 50,000 of these scanners running within six years, aiming for a billion scans a month, with a flagship "Midjourney Spa" planned for San Francisco in late 2027.
What it actually does (for now):
• No FDA clearance yet for diagnosis. Midjourney is launching with body composition maps only, not disease detection.
• Built with Butterfly Network's Ultrasound-on-Chip imaging modules, 40 per unit.
• Roughly 100x faster than a traditional MRI, by Midjourney's own comparison.
Why it matters:
An AI image-generation company moving into medical hardware says something about where this gold rush is heading: physical products, not just chat windows. Whether regulators let it scale past "body composition" reports is the real story to watch.
OPENAI
| 🧠 |
Gemini's Co-Lead Just Walked Out the Door, Straight to OpenAI |
Noam Shazeer, the engineering VP who co-led Google's Gemini and co-authored the 2017 "Attention Is All You Need" paper that kicked off the transformer era, announced on June 18 that he is joining OpenAI. He posted the news himself on X, saying he was "happy to share" the move.
The timing stings. Google brought Shazeer back in August 2024 as part of a roughly $2.7 billion deal tied to Character.AI, the company he and Daniel De Freitas had built after first leaving Google in 2021. Less than two years later, he is gone again, this time to the rival lab.
Why this one hurts:
• Shazeer co-authored the original Transformer paper, the architecture every modern LLM still runs on.
• Google reportedly paid around $2.7 billion to bring him back in 2024.
• He is heading straight to Google's biggest competitor.
Why it matters:
Talent has become the actual scarce resource in frontier AI, sometimes more than compute. When the person behind the architecture leaves for the competitor, that is a louder signal than any product launch.
| 💸 |
Tim Cook: AI Made Your Next iPhone More Expensive |
In a Wall Street Journal interview published June 17-18, outgoing Apple CEO Tim Cook said price increases are "unavoidable" because memory and storage chip costs have roughly quadrupled in a year, driven by AI data centers buying up the same components. He didn't say which products or when. Trump separately announced on June 18 that Apple agreed to build chips domestically with Intel, mostly for older or lower-end products, and Intel's stock jumped over 9% on the news.
WHY IT MATTERS:
AI is not just a software story anymore. It is now visibly reshaping hardware prices for everyone, even people who have never touched a chatbot.
| 🎬 |
Adobe's AI Agent Now Lives Inside Photoshop, Premiere, and ChatGPT |
Adobe announced on June 18 that its Firefly-powered creative agent is expanding into Photoshop, Premiere, Illustrator, InDesign, and Frame.io, all in public beta. In Premiere it sorts footage, batch-renames clips, and assembles rough cuts. In Photoshop it handles batch background removal and brand-consistent layout updates. Adobe's tools are also reaching people who never open Creative Cloud, through direct integrations in ChatGPT and Claude, with Gemini coming next.
WHY IT MATTERS:
Adobe's AI strategy is not just "build better tools," it's "show up wherever people already are." If Firefly works the same inside Claude as inside Photoshop, that's a real distribution play.
|
⚡ Coming in Hot AI Tools of the Week |
June 20, 2026 |
4 tools worth adding to your workflow right now.
| 📄 |
AI DOCS Wondershare PDFelement Chat with any PDF using ChatGPT, DeepSeek, or Gemini, then translate it into any of 75 languages with legal and medical terminology intact. One click redacts personal information before you send a contract out. $79.99 a year versus Adobe Acrobat's $239.88. Try PDFelement → |
| 🔍 |
AI SEARCH Otterly.ai Tracks whether your brand actually shows up when people ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini for recommendations, the same way rank trackers watched Google for the last decade. r/SEO threads recommend it for catching AI search visibility before a competitor does. Try Otterly.ai → |
| 🎙 |
AI VOICE Murf Generates studio-quality voiceovers in 120+ voices across 20 languages, no recording booth required. Podcasters and course creators use it for intros and narration when they don't want to re-record a flubbed line. Try Murf free → |
| 📬 |
AI EMAIL Shortwave An email client that reads your inbox every morning and tells you, in plain language, what actually needs a reply today. It groups scattered threads by topic and drafts replies that sound like you, not a template. Discover Shortwave → |
⚡ Quick Hits
🌍 AI's biggest CEOs pitched G7 leaders on who should run the rules
Dario Amodei and Demis Hassabis pushed for a US-led coalition controlling chip access at a closed-door G7 meeting on June 17. Sam Altman pushed back, calling instead for an open international standards forum. Read the full story →
👟 The sneaker brand that became an AI data center company overnight
Allbirds officially renamed itself Smartbird on June 17, hired a former AWS executive as CEO, and pivoted to leasing AI compute hardware. The stock jumped as much as 75% over two trading days. Read the full story →
👓 XREAL's new glasses run on Gemini, cost under $1,500
XREAL unveiled its Aura glasses at AWE 2026, built on Google's Android XR platform with Gemini built in, a 70-degree field of view, and hand tracking. They ship fall 2026 in five countries. See the full specs →
🔮 Kurzweil isn't budging: human-level AI still lands in 2029
Ray Kurzweil reaffirmed his 26-year-old prediction in a recent interview, arguing Elon Musk's 2026 timeline is too early because true AGI still needs genuine physics understanding and affordable dexterous robotics. Read his reasoning →
⚔️ Pentagon confirms Grok helped target strikes in Iran
A sworn court filing revealed the Pentagon's "Grok Gov" model, built on xAI's Grok, was used inside its Maven targeting system during a 96-hour operation that hit more than 2,000 sites in Iran. Investigators are separately reviewing whether AI-assisted targeting played a role in a strike that hit a girls' school. Read the full report →
🏗 From the AI Infra Desk
How Do Data Centers Make Money? The Real Numbers
A standard megawatt of colocation capacity brings in about $4.4 million a year. Pack that same megawatt with GPUs for AI workloads, and operators are reportedly pulling $10 million to $60 million instead.
|
$370/kW Average monthly Tier-1 colocation power price Factwagon, 2026 |
$10M-$60M Estimated annual revenue per MW for AI-optimized GPU facilities r/datacenter, 2026 |
That's all for this edition! What tools are you most excited to try?
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See you on Wednesday,
The AI Tool Discovery Team
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