“We’ve spent thousands of hours training our machine learning model on the different types of smells that you might encounter in the forest,” Brinkschulte says. “We don’t need big data centers to do our computation.”
Like all AI applications, Dryad’s tech could deliver false-positive signals, but it’s also possible the solar-powered “noses” could save water by alerting firefighters early enough that they’re able to stop budding flames before they spread.