Artificial intelligence is much debated in many fields, and discussions are quite animated on this issue. Brilliant minds like Stephen Hawking speak on how, in the long run, artificial intelligence might replace human intelligence. One might consider this debate quite far from our small cosmetics industry’s concerns. However, as things are getting globalized, it seems this issue is catching us up faster than we thought. As an example, several recent publications have provided updates on it, and a few initiatives might actually be transferred to our activity, although they do not show extraordinary imagination.
Quite surprisingly, one of the fields that could be directly affected is formulation. We could have thought it would happen much later, given the importance of know-how and knack in this area, but things are not that simple! Some of you might have followed the huge success of Watson on Jeopardy champions, or on its use in human medicine or weather forecast. These developments were not much likely to catch us up too soon. And yet, as part of this very project, IBM has been developing, for over a year, an approach called Chef Watson able to combine ingredients to create cooking recipes. Chef Watson has a large memory that contains thousands of ingredients, as well as the molecules that give them their specific flavour. Engineers loaded 9,000 existing recipes in the computer’s memory, so that Watson could analyse the ingredient combinations popular among humans and determine the molecule associations that seemed to work well. In addition, it integrated how the different ingredients needed to be prepared, and how they could be cooked . The experience was so positive that the American company even published a book presenting 65 dishes made by artificial intelligence. Of course, all this only has …
