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Alex Wiltschko

๐Ÿ‘ค Speaker
332 total appearances

Appearances Over Time

Podcast Appearances

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415]

scent is all clumped together and you experience that as one kind of unified sensation as a smell you got to separate them to analyze them and so what you do first is you run them through a race and the light molecules make it through the race first and so they can be analyzed one by one here and heavy molecules come out later and later and later so this basically separates the scent into each individual molecule that's in the smell and then this side weighs them so the molecules enter the mass spectrometer after being separated and you basically hit it with a

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415]

scent is all clumped together and you experience that as one kind of unified sensation as a smell you got to separate them to analyze them and so what you do first is you run them through a race and the light molecules make it through the race first and so they can be analyzed one by one here and heavy molecules come out later and later and later so this basically separates the scent into each individual molecule that's in the smell and then this side weighs them so the molecules enter the mass spectrometer after being separated and you basically hit it with a

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415]

an electron gun and it shatters the molecule into pieces and you very carefully weigh those pieces. And then you play kind of like a Sudoku puzzle to figure out, okay, given the weights of these fragments, given how long it took to run this race, what was that molecule? And typically this interpretation is done part by software, part by people.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415]

an electron gun and it shatters the molecule into pieces and you very carefully weigh those pieces. And then you play kind of like a Sudoku puzzle to figure out, okay, given the weights of these fragments, given how long it took to run this race, what was that molecule? And typically this interpretation is done part by software, part by people.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415]

And what we've done at Osmo is make that happen entirely by software. So that's a part of our OI

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415]

And what we've done at Osmo is make that happen entirely by software. So that's a part of our OI

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415]

So nobody knows, but we're teaching the machines to figure that out. So that has been the core, core issue of why scent hasn't been digitized is because exactly what you're saying is- You don't know what maple syrup breaks down into as primary smells. Exactly. So people have been analyzing the molecular content of these smells for a long time.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415]

So nobody knows, but we're teaching the machines to figure that out. So that has been the core, core issue of why scent hasn't been digitized is because exactly what you're saying is- You don't know what maple syrup breaks down into as primary smells. Exactly. So people have been analyzing the molecular content of these smells for a long time.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415]

So you can go look up in some textbook what the molecules in maple syrup are. but the ability to say, okay, I want maple syrup with a little bit more cherry, or I want maple syrup, but don't use that molecule because we know it's not safe. Use this other molecule. That requires tons of trade craft. That is what we're automating.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415]

So you can go look up in some textbook what the molecules in maple syrup are. but the ability to say, okay, I want maple syrup with a little bit more cherry, or I want maple syrup, but don't use that molecule because we know it's not safe. Use this other molecule. That requires tons of trade craft. That is what we're automating.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415]

So these machines are great. And what we're

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415]

So these machines are great. And what we're

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415]

not going to do is we're not going to change the hardware because there's about a there's 12 nobel prizes worth of advances inside of these machines they're fantastic what we've done is rip out the brains and we've replaced it with our own brain so a lot of what we've noticed is the hardware actually is already pretty good in the realm of scent and chemistry but the software or the maps that link the different pieces of hardware has been completely missing that's what we built this is kind of like an inner sanctum here um

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415]

not going to do is we're not going to change the hardware because there's about a there's 12 nobel prizes worth of advances inside of these machines they're fantastic what we've done is rip out the brains and we've replaced it with our own brain so a lot of what we've noticed is the hardware actually is already pretty good in the realm of scent and chemistry but the software or the maps that link the different pieces of hardware has been completely missing that's what we built this is kind of like an inner sanctum here um

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415]

So this is where we keep every AI-designed molecule that we've made, which is probably a significant fraction of all AI-designed molecules ever. And so this is just one slice of it. So in this room is 10,000, 20,000 molecules that have all been designed by AI. And we have a digital twin of each. So if we need to go back and access it, we know it's fridge one, shelf three, row column two, four.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415]

So this is where we keep every AI-designed molecule that we've made, which is probably a significant fraction of all AI-designed molecules ever. And so this is just one slice of it. So in this room is 10,000, 20,000 molecules that have all been designed by AI. And we have a digital twin of each. So if we need to go back and access it, we know it's fridge one, shelf three, row column two, four.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415]

And the sum total of it kind of smells like a bready radish or something like that. Amazing.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415]

And the sum total of it kind of smells like a bready radish or something like that. Amazing.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415]

We've brought a lot of people into Osmo that have like truly world-class noses. And so I can say definitively that like I'm not world-class. So this is kind of the Rolls-Royce machine. It does the same thing as the other one, except there's two more things that are interesting. One is you don't have to inject a liquid into this.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415]

We've brought a lot of people into Osmo that have like truly world-class noses. And so I can say definitively that like I'm not world-class. So this is kind of the Rolls-Royce machine. It does the same thing as the other one, except there's two more things that are interesting. One is you don't have to inject a liquid into this.