Alex Wiltschko

So first, you got to read the physical world, then you have to map it.

And then you have to write it back out again, right?

So that's what a speaker does, which is it takes those originally just grooves, but now digital signals, and then it moves a surface to recreate those airwaves.

The important thing about all that is those three steps are wildly different.

They're actually three different, totally different steps.

Those are three different technology stacks that each operate under different physical principles, but you have to have them all.

And so we're looking at digitizing the sense of smell, and we have to do all those three steps.

We have to read the chemical world and turn it into digital signals.

We have to map it, and then we have to write it back out again.

In when we started doing this, I mean, I've been thinking about this problem for about 20 years and Osmo's been going for three.

And before that, I was I was working on this problem at Google Brain for about six years.

What's a little crazy is the ability to read the chemical world already existed.

It was really good, actually.

There's these things called spectrometers.

It's what like CSI uses to figure out, you know, what are the different trace samples at a crime scene.

And then the ability to write the chemical world back out again is also pretty good.

There's these fluid handling robots that will move around ingredients and mix them kind of like an inkjet printer can mix inks.

The part that was missing was the map.

And that's been a super hard problem to crack.

And again, let's think about vision.