Munch, crunch, sip, invest and ovecome
Food
US trends
Ozempic’s becoming an obsession:
All while US obesity rates climbing (heh, more like breathing heavily and trying to stand up):
Another interesting data point from Chartr - species Americans deem morally OK to eat:
OK, OK, I get it with chicken topping the chart. But what on Earth did horses do to vegetarians? 25% never-vegs deem horses suitable for eating, with more than double (51%) among current/former vegetarians. (Someone’s salty over all that yummy microgreen and tasty grass…). Curious as to what this statistic would be in, say, Tatarstan (Region of Russia with more or less routine of using horse meat as a food staple) 🤔
Another point of interest are cats - 15% vs 37% vegetarians deem cats okay to be eaten. No comments, basically.
Biotech news
Animal protein expressed in…plants
Moolec Science secured $30M recently as a convertible note (for 15,000 tons of their product…); they’re expressing animal 🐖 proteins in, currently, soy (pea protein in plans):
Circular insect protein pipeline
Protix, after developing a circular pipeline for insect protein, had secured an investment from Tyson Foods, an American food company:
Basically, they’re feeding larvae food waste, essentially reducing waste (more suicide attempts ➡️ less suicide attempts!); looks and smells sustainable, does it? 🥰
Lab fats, biopsied and customized
Hoxton Farms believes that lab-grown fat is the answer (to fat investors’ revenue streams) to taste: they’re growing fat from biopsied (🐖) cells, in a porcine-like nutrient broth. The cycle takes ~4 weeks. They’re hoping to get US and Singapore approvals first, as EU’s process can take years.
BTW, there’s an investment memo on them! Another approach is spearheaded by Melt&Marble from Sweden: they’re modifying bacteria to produce an arbitrarily custom fat composition.
Fermentation capacity
Fermentation capacity is a bottleneck for the majority of foodtech startups. MycoTechnology had recently launched a FaaS (fermentation as a service) business model catering to that. Reminding everyone of another resource, capacitor.bio, that is basically a level above - a platform to find fermentation capacity/FaaS! Quite an old “State of Fermentation” report can be found at Good Food Institute.
Coffee without coffee, but with dates
A whole other world is coffee. It turned out there’s a looming problem, so-called 2050 problem, i.e. “50% less arable land suitable for growing coffee by 2050”.
And there are guys who just cater to it, making a better coffee out of a mix of plant ingredients and caffeine. No methylxanthines, yeah. Namely, Atomo Coffee, however the space’s ridden with other approaches.
Norway
So, basically, Norway’s so-called Wealth Fund is now worth $1.4T, and is one of the biggest and most diverse investment funds there are.
It’s now comprised of more than 9000 equities, rental real estate etc., basically ~1.5% of total stock market:
They’ve got quite a strict thesis aimed at sustainability:
As we own a small slice of most of the world’s largest companies, we have the ability to influence how they operate. We aim to promote long-term value creation at the companies and minimize negative effects on the environment and society.
The Norwegian parliament has decided that the fund should not invest in companies that:
manufacture certain types of weapons
produce tobacco or cannabis for recreational use
base their operations on coal
contribute to violations of fundamental ethical norms
F***tuning LLMs
As not delivered, a short quote:
Our red teaming studies find that the safety alignment of LLMs can be compromised by fine-tuning with only a few adversarially designed training examples. For instance, we jailbreak GPT-3.5 Turbo’s safety guardrails by fine-tuning it on only 10 such examples at a cost of less than $0.20 via OpenAI’s APIs, making the model responsive to nearly any harmful instructions. Disconcertingly, our research also reveals that, even without malicious intent, simply fine-tuning with benign and commonly used datasets can also inadvertently degrade the safety alignment of LLMs
In an image:
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Citation
@online{kogan2023,
author = {Kogan, Zakhar},
title = {Munch, Crunch, Sip, Invest and Ovecome},
date = {2023-10-27},
url = {https://teleogenic.com/posts/231027-biotech},
langid = {en}
}