Google researchers taught an AI to recognize smells

For decades, perfumers and scientists have struggled to predict the relationship between a molecule's structure and its scent. While scientists can look at a wavelength of light and identify what color it is, when it comes to scents, scientists can't simply look at a molecule and identify its odor. Researchers from the Google Brain Team are hoping AI might change that. In a paper published on Arxiv, they explain how they're training AI to recognize smells. The researchers created a data set of nearly 5,000 molecules identified by perfumers, who labeled the molecules with descriptions ranging from "buttery" to "tropical" and "weedy."