Grant Harvey

Farewell for now, humans.

So behind every AI response, there's an invisible army of humans who trained it, labeling images, rating answers, and teaching these models right from wrong.

Today, we're going to talk to Casper Elliott from the company that's trained 80% of the world's top AI models.

Welcome, humans, to the latest episode of the Neuron Podcast.

I'm Corey Knowles, and we're joined, as always, by Grant Harvey, writer of the Neuron Daily AI newsletter.

And today, we're diving deep into the human side of AI with Casper Elliott from Invisible Technologies.

Today, we are talking about something truly wild, teaching computers to smell.

Casper, thanks so much for joining us.

Our guest is Alex Wilczko, founder and CEO of Osmo, the first company to digitize scent.

They've created an AI that can predict what a molecule smells like, teleport scents across rooms, and design brand new fragrance molecules that have never even existed before.

And this isn't just about making better perfumes.

Alex thinks this could actually help us detect diseases earlier and even fight malaria.

That's wild.

Alex, welcome to The Neuron.

I think a lot of people believe that all that's happening is AI is scooping up the Internet and just training itself on all of that, and then it just magically works.

Can you elaborate a little bit on how that happens as far as, like, a little more technically?

Have you met the Internet?

You're essentially butting up against like Arthur C. Clarke's third law that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

And to the average person, like, you know, I always joke that when you work with someone who hasn't spent time with this and you show them something that really impresses them, it's just like you pulled a quarter out of your ear.

You know how AI coding agents feel fast until you're stuck fixing their code and realize it would have been quicker to just do it yourself?