Scobleizer

This summer a 40-year-old friend and brilliant software engineer, Brandon Wirtz, died due to colon cancer and my dad died of pancreatic cancer too. At first neither of their doctors diagnosed properly (Brandon was frequently getting sick and my dad kept having more and more problems). Ever since Brandon discovered his cancer, I’ve started taking healthcare more seriously, wondering if there’s a way to diagnose such diseases earlier.

Last week a new clinic, Prenuvo, opened near San Francisco, that promises to do just that by doing a full-body MRI scan (Magnetic Resonance Imaging). This is like a high-resolution X-ray machine except it doesn’t use radiation to make its images.

I was lucky enough to be one of the first to be scanned in its new location (it has been doing such scans for a decade up in Vancouver, Canada) by founder, Dr Raj Attariwala. Here I filmed the consultation with Dr. Raj right after my scans were done.

The process? You pay $2,500. You spend an hour inside an MRI machine. For me, it was a chance to hold perfectly still for an hour, while I listened to the machine whir and buzz around me. After the hour, it takes a few minutes to process your images and then you sit down with a doctor, like I did here.

Luckily for me I got a pretty clean bill of health but you can see this is a powerful diagnostic tool to help doctors find dozens of problems before they become untreatable. Everything from heart disease to a variety of cancers. You can see how Dr. Raj walks through my entire body, including my brain, looking for problems that I’ll need to work on. He did find one with me, my mom had a bad back, and it looks like I’ve been blessed with the same problems, and he told me to do exercises to strengthen my core muscles to minimize that problem in the future.

In talking with cofounder/CEO Andrew Lacy the company has developed its own MRI machine to do these scans. He told me that most other MRIs are used only for specific body parts, usually after a cancer or problem has already been found. Prenuvo, he told me, has modified the software running the MRI machine to do specialized full-body scans that other machines can’t do easily. Also, his team is using these images to build machine learning to assist the doctors in helping find various problems and, also, in its plans to scale this to more people over time (the San Francisco location has two scanners that can do two people an hour, the company has plans to open more locations and do more scans per hour, but that will need more AI work, and a training of doctors to look for problems when they are early, rather late-stage like they usually see).

For me it’s amazing to see inside your own body for the first time and the company gives its customers all scans on a mobile app that you can explore on your own time later. It also sends the scans to your primary-care physician, or to other doctors for second opinions.

You can learn more about this service at https://www.prenuvo.com.

Business of the future will need to be more predictive.

That’s what VMware’s Justin Murray, a long-time VMware employee told me here as he explained the latest in AI and Machine Learning that he’s seeing evolve.

The folks who run VMware’s huge conference, VMworld (happens September 29-October 1), got interested in me after reading my latest book, “The Infinite Retina,” which is how augmented reality and artificial intelligence, along with a few other technologies that I call Spatial Computing, will radically change seven industries over the next decade.

You see this predictive nature of AI in things like robots, autonomous cars, and, even, other things like Spotify, which uses AI to build playlists. That predicts what kind of music we would like to listen to. Autonomous cars predict the next action of both people and other cars on the streets. The AI inside is always trying to answer questions like: “will a child walking on the side of the road try to cross the street in front of us?” Properly predicting what is about to happen on the road is important and, I ask Murray, if that same predictive technology is what he’s thinking will be used elsewhere in businesses?

Murray says “yes,” but then goes a lot further, and predicts what some of the hot discussions will be at VMworld next week.

For instance:

1. Every major cloud provider, like Amazon’s Web Services, Microsoft’s Azure, or Google’s Cloud Services, is buying tons of NVidia’s powerful GPUs for their datacenters to support these new, predictive, AI services that businesses are starting to build.

2. The AI architecture and tooling stack that runs on these is seeing sizeable changes, and NVidia and VMware will make some announcements there next week.

3. Powerful new AI supercomputers are now being built because NVidia cards are being “connected together” in a powerful new way to make new workloads possible.

Why do I care, especially since usually I’m interested in new startups or consumer electronics gadgets?

Well, let’s walk through my life. Recently I got a June Oven. You put a piece of toast in it, or a piece of salmon, and it uses a small camera and an NVidia card inside, along with machine learning-based software, to automatically recognize what food I am trying to cook or bake. It’s magic. Plus, I never burn my toast anymore the way we used to because I often didn’t get the settings right.

Or, look at the new DJI Osmo 4 I used to do the intro to this video. On there is three little motors, and the instructions for how to move those motors is generated, in part, by machine learning that is constantly evaluating how best to steady my iPhone.

Finally, look at my Tesla. Murray told me that there’s more than a dozen AI-based systems running on that, and it drove most of the way to VMware’s headquarters in Palo Alto, CA, which makes my drives more relaxing (particularly in traffic where my car does all the stop-and-go duties) and safer.

Already AI has radically changed my life and most people in the industry say AI is just getting going. One reason VMware is compensating me to do this series of posts is because about a decade ago I was the first to see Siri, which was the first AI-based consumer application to come to market. My posts back then kicked off the AI age but a decade later AI has started deeply falling in price and is getting simpler to do, so it’s being used in a lot more new workloads.

You might not realize just who VMware is, but you probably use one of its services everyday, or, rather, the companies you deal with everyday use VMware to run their businesses. When I worked at Rackspace, a major cloud computing provider, for instance, we used VMware all over the place in our datacenters. “VM” stands for “Virtual Machine,” and VMware is the one that popularized that term for technology that can split up a physical computer into tons of “virtual” computers (or join them together with millions of other machines to build a supercomputer). Today that technology is used to do a bunch of things, from letting you manage your laptop better and run it more safely, to managing huge businesses, to soon managing new Spatial Computing infrastructure and devices (I wrote about such in my latest book).

All of this will be discussed at VMworld, which is a huge free virtual event, with more than 100,000 attendees and hundreds of sessions, covers not just what is happening here in AI, but across a range of technologies that businesses use everyday, from security-focused ones, to data-center-management focused ones. If you like this conversation, which is just one out of thousands of VMware employees or customers you will meet at VMworld, register for your free attendee badge here.

I don’t even need an AI to predict that you’ll find at least a few of the sessions out of the 900 offered useful for your business, see you on the 29th!