mimic sightAlex Wiltschko is the CEO and co-founder of Osmo, a startup that uses artificial intelligence technology to help computers "generate smells like we generate images and sounds," per theWiltschko has been "obsessed with smell" for a long time, he tells CNBC Make It. "It's been my passion to try to understand smell. It's this very powerful emotional sense, yet we know so little about it.
While Osmo began as a research project during Wiltschko's days at Google, he went on to co-launch it asAs Osmo's CEO, he says the startup's mission is to "improve human health and happiness" by digitizing humans' sense of smell. "Those products will usually have fragrance in them designed by a very small number of secretive companies," Wiltschko says. "We think we can do better with them by building better and safer ingredients that aren't toxic ... and don't irritate your skin or your eyes."During his time at Google Research, Wiltschko's team used machine learning software to develop a ".
But thanks to advances in AI technology, the model was able to pick up on patterns in the different structures of the molecules and use that knowledge to accurately predict the odor of other molecules.Building Osmo's AI model from the ground up, can be trained on data from "the entire internet," a similar digital library of information on scents wasn't as readily available when they began building their AI model, Wiltschko says.