YouSaid · the spoken record

Alex Wiltschko

lines on the record: 70
first: 2025-03-18
most recent: 2025-03-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Now the risk is how do you focus? This is kind of like a piece of history here on Plum 1.0. This was the first scent that was teleported. So the first scent to be digitized and then reconstituted in another place. And what we've done with this, and I will show you the vial here, is this is the essence of a fresh summer plum. And in this vial, this kind of clear liquid is probably thousands or tens of thousands of sniffs worth of this one moment of biting into a fresh summer plum. And what we're showing here is literally everything, the source code of that memory, of that sent experience. So I want you to smell it. So I've already dipped some in the vial, so I just put the blotter into the vial. But close your eyes and think of biting into a fresh summer plum.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first investor perspectives that we made, the double-edged sword was like, okay, so we have this entire space to ourselves.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There already is an arms race, and so this, I'm sure, is going to be the next frontier because we're about to really stem the tide.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More pungent, right? So the difference is the counterfeiters are really good at visual identity, but the smell of the shoe is basically the fingerprint of everything that ever happened to make this. What we've been able to do with Stock X is show that we can take those really big sensors that are in the lab, cut the right corners, make them smaller so it's actually the sensors are about the size of these two shoeboxes together. That's one right there. And what we do is we can take the thumb hole of the shoebox and basically insert it into a sniffer and it will within 20 seconds it'll tell you real or thing. And we just have to show it a few reels, a few fakes. Sometimes it's more, sometimes it's less. But then whenever a new skew shows up, we grab some of the fakes, we grab some of the reels, we train it on the new skew. And then now there's a device that can tell them apart.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then you start making progress bit by bit. And the first sense are like dumb. They don't work or they don't smell right. And then like you come back four weeks later, you're like, that one was really good. Holy crap, I think it's working. And then they all start to work. And then you start to go talk to customers. And they start to accept some of your sense for products. And then it really starts to roll. And, you know, it's bit by bit. keep going. You know what StockX is? They have a problem with fakes from Timu. I want you to hold this in your right hand and smell inside of it. And I want you to hold this in your left hand and smell inside of it. And I want you to look at them. Can you tell the difference between these? I mean,”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're kind of at the scientific frontier. And so, like, everything that we discover every week, every month pushes back what's known about smell and how to construct it. I think One thing that I found in doing science and machine learning and combining these things is problems that people sometimes think are totally intractable. Once you just get started, you're like, oh, we're actually making progress. And so the idea of creating sense with AI and creating those sense in partnership with people and fusing human and machine to work in this very emotional world of sense. You just don't think of it. It's like it's crazy.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They only had certain smells that were like whole seas. And so they didn't have primary odors. They didn't have the ability to create any smell. And so here on this robot, you're obviously not putting this behind a couch cushion yet. But we're going to make this smaller. But the idea here is you need to have all the ingredients together that can be mixed on the fly to create any experience. Not just like eight pre-programmed experiences. That's like a slideshow, right? We want an actual display that can show anything.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's like I'm simplifying, but I'm going to hand you the real... It and you're going to tell me There's more nuance to how we do that to create data that can actually be fed into machine learning system. But that's effectively it, which is like, do these things match? And there's a few tricks that you use to help de-bias people and get reliable data, but you're the arbiter, right? If it's like a smell you're familiar with and I'm trying to recreate a memory that you have, we either did it or we didn't.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And if you can read and write, then you can create this virtuous cycle where you're creating data at every run of the loop. And so if you actually can create new smells, and then you can turn those smells into data readings of some kind, you're training AI, right? And then if you can tilt that process so the next smells that you create the next day teach the system even more that's when you're doing what's called active learning and that's how you get AI systems to get smart really fast and that's what we do.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We put it into one of these vials, we analyze the smell, and then we actually reprinted the smell on the other side of the lab, which I'll show you. The other thing you can do with this machine, which is really cool, is you can pause the smell at any point in time, and you can just sniff molecule by molecule. So ascent will be like 30 molecules, 100 molecules all blended together, different types. You can smell them one by one by putting your nose on here. Kind of like a debugger for software. So, this is called a GCO or gas chromatograph olfactometer. But when we really want to understand the smell and kind of like build our intuition when we're building new protocols, we'll actually sit here and sniff stuff that comes off of the sheet.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what it does is it pumps air into these vials with a needle syringe so it'll get dropped in here, a needle will be pushed into it. Basically, we'll suck the air and we'll concentrate it onto, you know, like Kodak film absorbs light. We have film that absorbs scent. And then basically concentrate the smell on that thin piece of film. And then you move that needle and you inject it into the spectrometer and it uses a flash of heat to remove all those molecules. It kind of develops the film. And then the normal machine runs. We analyze that data with AI. And then we can pull back out what the scent actually was. So this means that we can analyze flowers and vegetables and people and fruits. And so what we did, the first scent that we fully teleported digitally was a fresh summer plum. So it was like kind of the purple plum. You know, like the really good ones have like a snap when you bite into it. It was like one of those fresh ones. So we sliced it.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've brought a lot of people into Osmo that have truly world-class noses. And so I can say definitively that I'm not world class. So this is kind of the Rolls-Royce machine. It does the same thing as the other one, except there's two more things that are interesting. One is you don't have to inject a liquid into this. You can put anything into these vials and it will suck the smell from out of what you put in the vials and we'll analyze it.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, these machines are great. And what we're not going to do is we're not going to change the hardware because there's about 12 Nobel Prizes worth of advances inside of these machines. They're fantastic. What we've done is rip out the brains. Can we replaced it with our own brains? So a lot of what we've noticed is the hardware actually is already pretty good in the realm of scent and chemistry, but the software or the maps that link different pieces of hardware has been completely missing. That's what we built. This is kind of like an intercanctum here. So this is where we keep every AI design molecule that we've made, which is probably significant fraction of all AI design molecules ever. And so this is just one slice of it. So in this room is, you know, 10, 20,000 molecules that have all been designed by AI, and we have a digital twin of each. So if we need to go back and access it, we know it's fridge one, shelf three, roll call.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So people have been analyzing the molecular content of these smells for a long time. So like you can go look up in some textbook what the molecules and maple syrup are, but the ability to say, okay, I want maple syrup with a little bit more cherry. Or I want maple syrup, but don't use that molecule because we know it's not safe. Use this other molecule. That requires tons of trade craft. That is what we're automating.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So nobody knows, but we're teaching machines to figure that out, right? So that has been the core issue of why Cent hasn't been digitized is because exactly what you're saying is.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By one here, and heavy molecules come out later and later and later. So this basically separates the scent into each individual molecule that's in the smell. And then this side weighs them. So the molecules enter the mass spectrometer after being separated. And you basically hit it with an electron gun and it shatters the molecule to pieces and you very carefully weigh those pieces. And then you play kind of like a Sudoku puzzle to figure out, okay, given the weights of these fragments, given how long it took to run this race, what was that molecule? And typically this interpretation is done part by software, part by people, and what we've done at Osmo is make that happen entirely by software. So that's a part of our OI system.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a machine called a GCMS. This is basically a camera for the molecular world. I'll just show you kind of how it works. So this is a robotic autoloader. And so each one of these has a smell that we want to analyze at the molecular level. So this thing can run 24-7. So we load this thing up, we just let it run. What happens is you suck up a little bit of the smell as a liquid and you inject it. And it goes into this half of the device, which is basically an oven with a 50 meter long, very thin cable and you're shoving the smell through that cable. And what you're trying to make the smell do is like runners in a marathon. So every molecule in that scent is all clumped together and you experience that as one kind of unified sensation as a smell. You got to separate them to analyze them. And so what you do first is you run them through a race and the light molecules make it through the race first and so they can be analyzed.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, a perfumer will be able to pull any of these ingredients together and mix them in the right ratios to recreate your scent memory. So like the smell of fresh laundry was made by a person from some of these ingredients. The smell of a clean kitchen was created from some of these ingredients. So 90% of the products in your home have a fragrance in every single one of those fragrances was crafted by an individual and they were crafted by combining these ingredients together. So what we're doing at Osmo is teaching AI about these ingredients and how to work with them in a safe way to do a super fast, to do a super affordable and to be able to launch new beautiful scents that were awesome.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can you please help us? So we take all those requirements and we go back into the lab, and we use AI, but when it's applied to olfaction, we call it OI or olfactory intelligence. So we use OI to design new molecules, which we then synthesize with our synthetic chemistry team, smell them, they work. We launch them. The smell is so remarkable and it's like wafts and changes. It's so cool. So it's like a little bit maple syrupy today. So I don't know what they're making. I guess they're going through a lot of commercial fragrances right now. So you're smelling kind of the sym total of our work. So behind you is what's called the perfumer's organ. Each bottle there is like kind of a key on a piano. And instead of 88 keys, it's about 1,200 keys.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we smell a lot of stuff. Twice a day we run sensory panels where we just sniff stuff and label stuff. So it's just like Scale AI has people labeling images all over the world. Turns out we couldn't just buy that service from anybody. We had to build it from the ground up. So this is where things get tested in low latency work happens. And then when we scale it, that happens elsewhere. So they're literally going through smelling stuff. Are they like notably talented smellers? We actually have literal rankings. And so when we need really accurate data of a certain kind, we will call on our top dogs, you know? So in there is synthetic chemistry, just like a drug company to create a new molecule to affect human health, where you create new molecules that affect human perception. And we design those on spec for customers. A large customer might say, all right, we're having this problem making our detergent smell this way, or the regulatory landscape is changing. We can't use this molecule.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source