Copy of the article because I don’t respect Microsoft: With finite natural resources and a growing demand for food, the world must find ways to overcome this challenge. One proposal comes from a Brazilian startup that will produce milk proteins without the need for cows. Founded in 2023, Future Cow wants to transform the dairy market by using precision fermentation, a process that combines high technology, sustainability, and production efficiency. "Our mission is to make milk without a cow," summarizes Leonardo Vieira, the company's co-founder and CEO. "Precision fermentation is a technology similar to that used in the production of beer or wine." The entrepreneur explains that the technology involves identifying the genetic sequence in the animal's DNA that provides instructions for producing the milk protein. The sequence is then copied and encoded in a host, which can be a fungus, yeast, or bacterium. The host then multiplies in a fermentation tank with a calorie source for nutrition. The result is a liquid that—after being filtered and dried—is transformed into the initially programmed milk proteins. "These proteins serve as ingredients for the food and dairy industry, which can recombine the product to create various derivatives," he explains. The foodtech will use yeast as hosts to initially produce casein and whey protein, two of the main proteins found in milk. Casein is widely used in cheese and yogurt production, while whey is rich in protein and highly valued in the food supplement market. There are also other proteins in milk, each with specific applications. "One of them is lactoferrin, which is extremely difficult to produce using traditional methods," says Vieira. "It takes 10,000 liters of milk to obtain just one kilo of this ingredient." #From the laboratory to the market Future Cow began operating in the Supera Technology Park in Ribeirão Preto, São Paulo state. There, it produced the first grams of milk protein using precision fermentation. It was then selected to take part in the DeepTech Acceleration Program (PACE) of the Brazilian Center for Research in Energy and Materials (CNPEM) in Campinas. It is now testing the scaling of the process, which is a critical stage for biotech companies. "Ninety-five percent of biotechs fail when they leave a bench environment and go to a pilot plant or other relevant environment," recalls Vieira. "We're very optimistic that with the support of the CNPEM and the available infrastructure, we'll achieve the scale-up we need for the next stage." The startup does not intend to replace animal milk entirely; rather, it wants to create complementary solutions for the industry. "When precision fermentation began, it was all very black or white: the product was either animal or it wasn't animal. Now, we see more hybrid models," Vieira observes. According to Vieira, executives from large dairies claim to already purchase all the available milk on the market. "They can't increase production by 20% or 30% with just the traditional raw material," he says. "If they can mix our ingredient with the animal product to create a hybrid product and increase the scale, it'll be a significant gain," he says. Another relevant aspect is the decarbonization agenda of large companies. "Even if precision fermentation doesn't fully replace animal milk, a 10% or 20% reduction in the carbon footprint of large corporations in the food sector would already represent a considerable environmental impact," Vieira continues. #Brazilian potential The sector for alternative proteins produced by precision fermentation is still in its early stages, but startups specializing in the segment are already emerging around the world. "Each one follows a different technological route. There's variation in the type of host [fungus, yeast, or bacteria] and in the target proteins," says Vieira. The entrepreneur points out that Brazil is in a privileged strategic position to lead the global market. "Brazil is the only country in the world that has an abundance of water, sugar, and renewable energy, which are the three essential inputs for fermentation. It's a unique opportunity for the country," he points out. "With these characteristics, Brazil can take the lead in a strategic industry for the future of global food." Future Cow's technical and economic analyses show that producing milk proteins on a 300,000-liter scale will be less expensive than traditional production methods. He points out that when precision fermentation reaches an industrial scale with lower costs, it will disrupt the market: "If Brazil only focuses on traditional agriculture at that point, we'll be left behind." The researcher cites New Zealand as an example. The country has characteristics similar to Brazil's, and a significant portion of its gross domestic product (GDP) comes from milk exports. "They've already realized that the sector is going to change and are moving to avoid being left behind," he comments. "I've been trying to alert the Brazilian government authorities to this potential." #Future prospects Future Cow already has a functional strain and is now looking to increase production yields. "The more the strain produces, the more the unit price falls. So we're optimizing the fermentation processes," Vieira asserts. The expectation is that the product will be ready and available for sale by the end of 2026. Since the product is an ingredient, the company will not sell directly to the end consumer, but rather will act as a supplier to the food industry. This approach could facilitate the startup's entry into the market. Vieira explains, "As an ingredient, our product can be incorporated into existing products without facing a high entry barrier." The startup will initially market the proteins it has already developed before expanding to other varieties. "Only after the first commercialization will we develop other proteins," says the entrepreneur. The company is preparing to take part in VivaTech, an innovation fair that will be held in Paris, France, in June. "The technology already exists in other countries and at VivaTech we'll be able to show that Brazil has it too," says Vieira. "We can win over investors who realize that we can manufacture in Brazil and export to other locations. This kind of exposure abroad is uncommon for Brazilian companies." At the meeting, Future Cow aims to connect with the innovation ecosystem, raise awareness of the development of the technology in Brazil, and attract potential corporate partners. "We want to demonstrate that we're developing alternative proteins and, with this, attract multinationals from the dairy sector to be our clients." #Scientific entrepreneurship One aspect that Vieira highlights is the combination of skills at Future Cow. While he brings experience in business and entrepreneurship, his partner, Rosana Goldbeck, has a Ph.D. in food engineering from the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP) and has already studied meat cultivation in Brazil. He says, "This mix is an important differentiator, as it brings together someone who understands business and someone who understands the technology." According to Vieira, this is one of the main barriers preventing more innovations from Brazilian universities from becoming commercial products: "Brazil produces a lot of science, has many scientific articles, but most of them don't become businesses," he laments. "There need to be more connections between the academic environment and entrepreneurship in Brazil." Provided by FAPESP

Gemini is just a web replacement protocol. With basic things we remember from olden days Web, but with everything non-essential removed, for a client to be doable in a couple of days. I have my own Gemini viewer, LOL. This for me seems a completely different application from torrents. I was dreaming for a thing similar to torrent trackers for aggregating storage and computation and indexing and search, with search and aggregation and other services' responses being structured and standardized, and cryptographic identities, and some kind of market services to sell and buy storage and computation in unified and pooled, but transparent way (scripted by buyer\seller), similar to MMORPG markets, with the representation (what is a siloed service in modern web) being on the client native application, and those services allowing to build any kind of client-server huge system on them, that being global. But that's more of a global Facebook\Usenet\whatever, a killer of platforms. Their infrastructure is internal, while their representation is public on the Internet. I want to make infrastructure public on the Internet, and representation client-side, sharing it for many kinds of applications. Adding another layer to the OSI model, so to say, between transport and application layer. For this application: I think you could have some kind of Kademlia-based p2p with groups voluntarily joined (involving very huge groups) where nodes store replicas of partitions of group common data based on their pseudo-random identifiers and/or some kind of ring built from those identifiers, to balance storage and resilience. If a group has a creator, then you can have replication factor propagated signed by them, and membership too signed by them. But if having a creator (even with cryptographically delegated decisions) and propagating changes by them is not ok, then maybe just using whole data hash, or it's bittorrent-like info tree hash, as namespace with peers freely joining it can do. Then it may be better to partition not by parts of the whole piece, but by info tree? I guess making it exactly bittorrent-like is not a good idea, rather some kind of block tree, like for a filesystem, and a separate piece of information to lookup which file is in which blocks. If we are doing directory structure. Then, with freely joining it, there's no need in any owners or replication factors, I guess just pseudorandom distribution of hashes will do, and each node storing first partitions closest to its hash. Now thinking about it, such a system would be not that different from bittorrent and can even be interoperable with it. There's the issue of updates, yes, hence I've started with groups having hierarchy of creators, who can make or accept those updates. Having that and the ability to gradually store one group's data to another group, it should be possible to do forks of a certain state. But that line of thought makes reusing bittorrent only possible for part of the system. The whole database is guaranteed to be more than a normal HDD (1 TB? I dunno). Absolutely guaranteed, no doubt at all. 1 TB (for example) would be someone's collection of favorite stuff, and not too rich one.

Lets see.

This is interesting to me as I like to say the llms are basically another abstraction of search. Initially it was links with no real weight that had to be gone through and then various algorithms weighted the return, then the results started giving a small blurb so one did not have to follow every link, and now your basically getting a report which should have references to the sources. I would like to see this looking at how folks engage with an llm. Basically my guess is if one treats the llm as a helper and collaborates to create the product that they will remember more than if they treat it as a servant and just instructs them to do it and takes the output as is.

If AI constantly refined its own output, sure, unless it hits a wall eventually or starts spewing bullshit because of some quirk of training. But I doubt it could learn to summarise better without external input, just like a compiler won't produce a more optimised version of itself without human development work.

Anyone here use XING?

Oh sorry, my mind must have been a bit foggy when I read that. We agree 100%