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Alex Wiltschko

๐Ÿ‘ค Speaker
909 total appearances

Appearances Over Time

Podcast Appearances

The Neuron: AI Explained
Teaching Computers to Smell?! The AI That's Digitizing Scent

And the answer I think is going to be, yeah.

The Neuron: AI Explained
Teaching Computers to Smell?! The AI That's Digitizing Scent

And I think about how photographs changed our relationship with memory.

The Neuron: AI Explained
Teaching Computers to Smell?! The AI That's Digitizing Scent

In 1820, 1825, just to be, you know, have two, a nice round 200 years ago, if you saw a beautiful sunset with your, with your son or your daughter, the impression of that sunset and what your child looked like at that age.

The Neuron: AI Explained
Teaching Computers to Smell?! The AI That's Digitizing Scent

Everybody just didn't think anything of it being permanent.

The Neuron: AI Explained
Teaching Computers to Smell?! The AI That's Digitizing Scent

It was ephemeral.

The Neuron: AI Explained
Teaching Computers to Smell?! The AI That's Digitizing Scent

So when your child got older, their face as a child is gone unless you could afford to pay for a painter, which is super rare.

The Neuron: AI Explained
Teaching Computers to Smell?! The AI That's Digitizing Scent

In that very moment, that sunset is also ephemeral.

The Neuron: AI Explained
Teaching Computers to Smell?! The AI That's Digitizing Scent

gone forever and then fast forward until the late 1800s all of a sudden there's this thing called the camera and you can actually hold on to light like just what the world you can just hold on to that that's crazy and then the phonograph also came around and then ultimately you know recorders that people could hold you know many decades later all of a sudden the sound of your grandma or of your child like you can just hold on to that forever that's crazy

The Neuron: AI Explained
Teaching Computers to Smell?! The AI That's Digitizing Scent

And I think that what we're building at Osmo, although we're very focused on creating fragrances and building a business so we can reinvest in curiosity, but where we're going is being able to engage with a kind of memory that we think we just assume will be gone forever.

The Neuron: AI Explained
Teaching Computers to Smell?! The AI That's Digitizing Scent

We just assume it's gone forever.

The Neuron: AI Explained
Teaching Computers to Smell?! The AI That's Digitizing Scent

And it doesn't have to be.

The Neuron: AI Explained
Teaching Computers to Smell?! The AI That's Digitizing Scent

Right.

The Neuron: AI Explained
Teaching Computers to Smell?! The AI That's Digitizing Scent

So, you know, our kind of super secret plan is, you know, build fragrances for the world's brands.

The Neuron: AI Explained
Teaching Computers to Smell?! The AI That's Digitizing Scent

Because what's crazy is the molecules that are in fruits and flowers and vegetables that go into beautiful scents that are sold on shelves.

The Neuron: AI Explained
Teaching Computers to Smell?! The AI That's Digitizing Scent

Those are the same molecules that you find in the smell of your loved ones and that you find in the smell of human disease.

The Neuron: AI Explained
Teaching Computers to Smell?! The AI That's Digitizing Scent

Now, the ratios are totally different, right?

The Neuron: AI Explained
Teaching Computers to Smell?! The AI That's Digitizing Scent

So the signal, the fingerprint that you get from each of those is wildly different, but nature reuses these molecules.

The Neuron: AI Explained
Teaching Computers to Smell?! The AI That's Digitizing Scent

And so if you get really good at building market-ready products, you're actually secretly teaching yourself how to understand and decipher and detect the smell of disease.

The Neuron: AI Explained
Teaching Computers to Smell?! The AI That's Digitizing Scent

And also the infrastructure you need to go and build those things actually means you have to build a lot of sense and analyze a lot of sense, which looks like a fragrance factory.

The Neuron: AI Explained
Teaching Computers to Smell?! The AI That's Digitizing Scent

Right.