Alex Wiltschko · Osmo
“How Osmo is digitizing smell to help machines sense disease early — and why founder Alex Wiltschko started with fragrance, not diagnostics.”
Meet Alex
Osmo AI CEO Alex Wiltschko is a pioneer in the field of olfactory science. He founded Osmo in 2022 after years of research at Google Brain, where he developed an AI model capable of predicting how molecules smell based on their structure. Wiltschko's work has led to significant advancements in computational olfaction, including the creation of an AI-powered fragrance house and the digitization of real-world scents. His mission is to democratize fragrance creation, allowing independent brands to access advanced scent technology and develop custom fragrances that resonate with their unique stories and identities.
In This Episode
How Osmo is teaching machines to identify and search scent — with the long-term goal of detecting disease earlier
Why Alex Wiltschko started with fragrance and consumer products instead of jumping directly to medical diagnostics
How a compact alphabet of roughly 20,000 to 30,000 molecules creates every smell that exists
Why scent may be the oldest language on Earth, and how AI can help humans begin to decode it
How losing his father to brain cancer turned Alex's scientific curiosity into a deeply personal mission
Chapters
- 01:18
Meet Alex Wiltschko: From Grief to Digitizing Smell
- 04:26
Why Scent Is the Oldest Language on Earth
- 08:29
Leaving Google to Found Osmo
- 13:20
How AI Is Reshaping Alex's Own Craft
- 17:14
Will AI Replace Jobs? Alex's Honest Take
- 28:23
Building an Interdisciplinary Team for Osmo
- 34:48
Where Osmo's Scents Already Exist in Your Life
- 42:19
Decoding the Alphabet of Scent
- 45:13
The Future: Smell as a Health Signal
Inspirational Quotes
“Scent does three things for us: it can delight us, it can protect us, or it can heal us. And it just so happens that scent is a language… It's the original language of life, and it's crazy we don't know how to speak it.”
— Alex Wiltschko
“AI allows me to be more efficient and get my ideas clear and figure out how to do so that I can go off and do what I want.”
— Justine Reichman
“I want to bring more health and happiness to people, and I can do that better now. And the people that I work with can do that better now because of these capabilities (AI).”
— Alex Wiltschko
“Even when I don't know how to do something, AI can help me, but having somebody knowledgeable about doing it is so much more efficient. Because when they're using AI, they know the questions to ask; they know how to frame something. That value is not unnoticed to me. Just because I could do it doesn't mean it's going to be as good, as efficient, or as thoughtful.”
— Justine Reichman
“If you have vision and if you have taste and you have some ability to coordinate, even a little bit, you're pretty well positioned to use AI to get a lot of interesting things done.”
— Alex Wiltschko
“The breakthroughs are happening by mathematicians, augmented by AI. All the breakthroughs are happening truly fundamentally by people. They're just using these new tools.”
— Alex Wiltschko
“It doesn't take anything away from us doing it. We're not doing it any less. We just have a little handholding.”
— Justine Reichman
“We want to build a platform and a fundamental capability that makes the world smell better… and we know from the fundamental understanding of how scent works that getting better at scent that delights you actually helps us get better at applications in scent that can protect and can heal.”
— Alex Wiltschko
“It's so important that we have to get the basics right before we attack that most profound goal.”
— Alex Wiltschko
“What if the spaces that we entered smelled beautiful? We would be happier. That's the goal: the world should smell better.”
— Alex Wiltschko
Resources
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Justine Reichman
Founder & CEO of NextGen Purpose. Host and Executive Producer of Essential Ingredients — 11 seasons, 332 episodes, and a growing movement.
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