Alex Wiltschko

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.

RGB, three numbers that are the map of color.

And in fact, we roughly have three different kinds of color receptors in our eye.

They roughly correspond to RGB.

We have over 300 types of olfactory receptors in our nose.

So the sense of smell is going to be, just based on that, 100 times higher dimensional, 100 times more complex.

Whatever map exists for smell is not going to fit on a flat piece of paper.

We're not going to look at an RGB diagram and be like, oh, that's why, you know, lavender smells close to this other floral, but far away from rotten eggs.