8 Sep 2026 01:00
08: The Language of Scent: How Alex Wiltschko Is Digitizing Smell
"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
Digitizing smell sounds like science fiction until you meet someone who's spent two decades chasing it. In this episode, Justine Reichman sits down with Alex Wiltschko, founder and CEO of Osmo, a company on a mission to give machines a sense of smell — and, eventually, to help detect disease before symptoms show up. Alex's path started long before Osmo. A PhD in olfactory neuroscience, five years leading Google's digital olfaction team, and a personal loss — his father's death from brain cancer — all converged into a single question: what if scent could tell us things about our health that we can't yet hear? This conversation covers how Osmo's AI model, OI One, is learning to create and detect scent, why the company deliberately started in fragrance instead of diagnostics, and what digital olfaction could mean for the next decade of human health. This episode is for anyone curious about AI's next frontier, the science of scent, or what it looks like to turn personal grief into a decades-long body of work. Key takeaways: Scent is built from a surprisingly small alphabet — roughly 20,000 to 30,000 molecules make up every smell on Earth. Osmo intentionally avoided starting with disease detection because the science wasn't ready; fragrance became the training ground that builds toward harder problems. Osmo's AI tool, Osmo Studio, now generates starting scent compositions that professional perfumers treat like a collaborative apprentice. Synthetic fragrance ingredients can actually be more environmentally efficient than natural ones, challenging a common assumption about "natural" being automatically better. Alex believes the next generation of professionals won't go "deep then senior" — they'll orchestrate AI agents wide first, creating entirely new kinds of jobs. The same molecules behind a loved one's hug can show up in food and fragrance, revealing scent as a shared chemical language across all of biology. Listen to the full episode to hear Alex's take on where scent technology is headed next. https://tinyurl.com/Essential-Ingredients-Podcast
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.
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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 Osm
