How AI Learns to Smell with Alex Wiltschko

Summary

In this episode, Alex Wiltschko, founder and CEO of Osmo, discusses his goal of giving computers a sense of smell and what it takes to build olfactory intelligence. He explains how graph neural networks and advanced embedding spaces allow AI to capture the multi-dimensional structure of scents, grouping them into perceptual neighborhoods, and creating a machine learning representation that predicts how molecules smell. Wiltschko describes how Osmo built the largest proprietary olfactory dataset from scratch to train a fleet of predictive models. Olfactory intelligence could eventually power applications beyond fragrance, including disease detection, emotion sensing, and consumer devices.