When Osmo's learned odor embedding space was visualized in two dimensions, molecules with the same human-labeled smell clustered together, and finer distinctions like jasmine, rose, and violet emerged as nested sub-regions inside the broader floral cluster without ever being told that hierarchy existed.
Alex describes how the principal odor map's embedding space self-organized into perceptually meaningful, nested neighborhoods (e.g., jasmine/rose/violet inside 'floral') purely from data, mirroring biological reality. ✦ AI generated
Alex Wiltschko · The TWIML AI Podcast · 2026-07-08 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 15:12
“And so now the structure that you observed in the embedding space talk a little bit about that.”
If we circled the floral region, it was this pretty big part on the left... But then if you draw like jasmine or rose or um you know, violet, they actually ended up being sub regions inside of floral. And we didn't tell it that... there was this nested relationship of of nature there.
verbatim transcript · starts at 15:12
15:12share the the images with with with the listeners if you'd like, but this the floral region was pretty big and was on a side of the left. But then if you draw like jasmine or rose or um you know, violet, they actually ended up being sub regions inside of floral. And we didn't tell it that like we didn't tell it that there was this nested relationship of of
15:29of nature there. And similarly, the the region for um for fermented and alcoholic was actually shaped like a bottle during our first model train and we haven't touched it since because it's so funny. [laughter] Um but things like fermented and whiny and like rum those those all fermented alcoholic um scents were all in the same region as well. And that this this pattern continued for basically all of scent. I mean that's I
15:53thought that was very beautiful. Um, one thing that really struck me with that map, which we're still working out, frankly, is these scents actually, if you if you blur your eyes, it it almost looks like how it's a story of how nature makes those scents, right? So, fermented uh scents like from wine or rum etc. Those are made by yeast that are fer actually it's a biological
16:18process that's producing these molecules, right? So, there's a story of how the molecules produced and same same with flowers. those are all genetically much more related to each other than they are to say um other species that produce nuts or you know bark or whatever. Um and uh they're all clustered together. So in a way like there's this story of like actual biological life and scent that seems to
16:39be very tightly woven together. >> And are there like confounding examples there? I'm imagining, you know, both fermentation and florals are kind of these natural scents, but are there other scents that are like completely unnatural? Maybe the the thing that we put in natural gas to give it a smell like and what is what are the shapes of [clears throat] the the shapes of these non organic smells like differ in some
17:08fundamental way? actually that that was our first line of business that we started was like can we somehow make new molecules that smell great um and that are safe and that we can produce at scale and that are affordable all that. Um and turns out like that's a very interesting business to be in because if you can make some some molecules um smell great but they're not safe or
- ·Embedding space visualized in two dimensions
- ·Molecules with same human-labeled smell clustered together
- ·Clustering emerged purely from data, unsupervised
- ·Floral region formed one large area on the left
- ·Jasmine, rose, violet emerged as sub-regions within it
- ·Never told this hierarchy existed beforehand
- ·Mirrors nested relationships found in nature