A new AI startup is on the cusp of revolutionising the way we smell with $60 million in pocket from major industry players and a crack team of neuroscientists and machine learning experts to boot.
Alex Wiltschko, a former Google researcher, is the CEO and co-founder of Osmo, a startup that aims to "enabling computers to do everything our noses can do. "
"It's been my passion to try to understand smell. It's this very powerful emotional sense, yet we know so little about it," Wiltschko told CNBC.
Wiltschko has a bachelor's degree in neuroscience from the University of Michigan and studied olfactory neuroscience at Harvard University, where he earned his PhD in 2016.
In 2017, he landed a job as a research scientist at Google Research, where he spent five years leading a team that used machine learning to help computers predict how different molecules smell based on their structure.
He co-launched Osmo as a separate startup in 2022 with support from Lux Capital and Google Ventures.
Wiltschko says the startup's mission is to "improve human health and happiness" by digitising humans' sense of smell.
The founder also wants to rid the environment of non-biodegradable and unsustainable elements that go into making flavours and fragrances and enter our bodies through their all pervasive use.
"This problem is getting harder over time, not easier, and many ingredients that perfumers and flavorists depend upon are being removed from the market because they’re not up to our increasing standards.
"F&F companies are continually making new ingredients to replace those that are being lost to regulation or disruptions in the supply chain," Wiltschko says.
"Those products will usually have fragrance in them designed by a very small number of secretive companies,” he 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."
His long-term plan is to help professionals detect diseases, even entire breakout of pandemics, earlier through smell.
"Our noses can detect Parkinson’s disease earlier than any diagnostic, sniff Alzheimer’s, COVID-19 and cancer. Why can’t our computers? Computers haven’t understood smell because we’ve had no map of it (imagine trying to build a camera without knowing about RGB, or a microphone without knowing about frequency)," he says.
During his time at Google Research, Wiltschko's team used machine learning software to develop a "principal odor map."
To that end, his team trained their AI model on a dataset of 5,000 aroma molecules across various odour categories such as floral, fruity or minty.
Wiltschko found that molecules can be tricky for computers to analyse due to their complex structures.
"The reason why it's so challenging is because you can move one tiny thing around in that molecule, like one bond, and the scent of the molecule goes from roses to rotten eggs," he says.
But soon with 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 odour of other molecules.
"It was superhuman in its ability to predict what things smelled like," he says.
While large language models 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.
"The one thing we realised was that we couldn’t use anybody else’s data," he told CNBC. "We actually spent about a year working with companies in the fragrance industry that had what they thought were great datasets, which we found were not."
That led Wiltschko and his team to build "a new kind of data."
The startup obtained thousands of molecules and descriptions of their scents according to master perfumers and built with it a neural network of its own kind.
"While our entry point is flavo(u)r & fragrance, our ultimate goal in giving computers a sense of smell is to improve human health and well being, and it’s going to take a long time to achieve this goal," Wiltschko says.
"We will eventually be able to detect disease with scent and we're on our way to building that technology," he says. "It’s not going to happen this year or anytime soon, but we’re on our way."
Image Source: Unsplash
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