Led by a former Google researcher, this company wants to give computers a sense of smell—here's how it worksAlex 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.
"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."." To do this, his team trained their AI model on a dataset of 5,000 aroma molecules across various odor categories such as floral, fruity or minty.
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., 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.