Osmo 希望通过 AI 重塑嗅觉视觉的未来

人工智能公司 Osmo 正在努力工作，以带回 1960 年 Hans Laube 向世界介绍“Smell-O-Vision”时所承诺的未来。

Artificial intelligence firm Osmo is working hard to bring back the future we were promised in 1960 when Hans Laube introduced the world to “Smell-O-Vision.” Only this time, the goal is to improve the lives of humans everywhere by teaching computers how to interpret scent.

人工智能公司 Osmo 正在努力实现 1960 年 Hans Laube 向世界推出“Smell-O-Vision”时所承诺的未来。只是这一次，我们的目标是通过教计算机如何解读气味来改善世界各地人类的生活。

Osmo's technology is a complex, multidisciplinary amalgamation of science and engineering at the cutting edge, but its purpose is simple. The company wants to build generative AI that can do for scents what OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini can do for sounds and images.

Osmo 的技术是复杂的、多学科的前沿科学与工程的融合，但其目的很简单。该公司希望构建生成式人工智能，能够像 OpenAI 的 ChatGPT 和谷歌的 Gemini 处理声音和图像一样处理气味。

Per the company’s website:

根据该公司的网站：

AI that can smell

能闻气味的AI

Teaching a computer to smell live odors isn’t as simple as giving it sight or sound. Microphones and cameras have existed for decades and the data they produce can be interpreted by a computer the same as any other input.

教计算机闻气味并不像让它看到或听到声音那么简单。麦克风和摄像头已经存在了几十年，它们产生的数据可以像任何其他输入一样由计算机解释。

But there’s no instrumental analogous to what the microphone is for the human ear. We have technologies such as breathalyzers that can analyze the chemical content of certain gases. These are used for purposes such as testing a person’s breath for the presence of ethanol in order to determine their blood alcohol level.

但没有一种乐器可以与麦克风对人耳的作用相类似。我们拥有呼吸分析仪等技术，可以分析某些气体的化学含量。这些用于测试人的呼吸中是否存在乙醇等目的，以确定他们的血液酒精含量。

However, these sensory devices have to be fine-tuned to detect a specific set of molecules. Even if a sensor could detect a spectrum of ambient molecules, a computer by itself wouldn’t be capable of classifying and identifying them without assistance from generative AI.

然而，这些传感装置必须进行微调才能检测一组特定的分子。即使传感器可以检测到一系列环境分子，如果没有生成人工智能的帮助，计算机本身也无法对它们进行分类和识别。

According to Osmo, that’s where AI comes in. Getting computers to smell involves the seemingly simple task of identifying which molecules are associated with which types of aromas and then training an AI to recognize and identify specific patterns.

根据 Osmo 的说法，这就是人工智能的用武之地。让计算机闻气味涉及看似简单的任务，即识别哪些分子与哪种类型的香气相关，然后训练人工智能识别特定模式。

It sounds easy enough, but it turns out that there’s no “smell map” for an AI to study. And inventing a dataset containing labeled examples of molecular bond associations from scratch turned out to be a monumental task.

这听起来很简单，但事实证明，没有可供人工智能研究的“气味图”。从头开始发明一个包含分子键关联标记示例的数据集是一项艰巨的任务。

Osmo CEO and co-founder Alex Wiltschko, a former Google engineer, told CNBC that the entire detection and identification process required incredible precision.

Osmo 首席执行官兼联合创始人、前谷歌工程师 Alex Wiltschko 告诉 CNBC，整个检测和识别过程需要令人难以置信的精确度。

“The molecules that carry an odor are present in the air at parts per billion,” said Wiltschko. “The AI has to learn to detect these molecules among millions of others in the background and identify them correctly within milliseconds. It's like finding a needle in a dense and ever-changing haystack.”

“带有气味的分子在空气中的含量为十亿分之一，”威尔奇科说。 “人工智能必须学会在后台数百万个其他分子中检测这些分子，并在几毫秒内正确识别它们。这就像在密集且不断变化的大海捞针中寻找一根针。”

Helping humanity

帮助人类

On the surface, the reemergence of Smell-O-Vision may not sound important. But the company hopes to build a system capable of superhuman feats of smell. These would include the ability to smell the presence of certain diseases such as cancer or symptoms associated with diabetes such as low blood sugar.

从表面上看，Smell-O-Vision 的重新出现听起来可能并不重要。但该公司希望建立一个能够实现超人嗅觉能力的系统。这些包括嗅出某些疾病（例如癌症）或与糖尿病相关的症状（例如低血糖）的能力。

The team also hopes to develop a method to recreate smells using molecular synthesis. This would, for example, allow a computer in one place to “smell” something and then send that information to another computer for resynthesis — essentially teleporting odor over the Internet.

该团队还希望开发一种利用分子合成来重现气味的方法。例如，这将允许一个地方的计算机“闻到”某种东西，然后将该信息发送到另一台计算机进行重新合成——本质上是通过互联网传送气味。

This also means scent could join sight and sound as part of the marketing and branding world. Organizations and companies may one day need to worry over which particular smells best represent their brands.

这也意味着气味可以与视觉和声音一起成为营销和品牌世界的一部分。有一天，组织和公司可能需要担心哪种特定气味最能代表他们的品牌。

This begs the question: which cryptocurrency would smell the best?

这就引出了一个问题：哪种加密货币闻起来最好？

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