Room for optimism on cultured meat?

ACX/Scott Alexander's summary:

But now a new report comes out arguing that the previous reports were wrong, that lab-grown meat production is going much better than the earlier reports thought possible, and it’s more or less cost-effective already for the simplest products! Again, mixed reactions, and although some of the numbers are indisputable the analysis itself this is by a VC firm with lab-based meat investments.

From the report:

Not long after Humbird’s analysis was published, independent news outlet The Counter (now part of Grist) ran a long-form feature that echoed many of the report’s key assumptions and conclusions. Together, the two pieces helped catalyze a wave of heightened skepticism, with their central arguments reiterated and amplified in mainstream outlets including Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal.

...

While it may take years—or even decades—to fully understand how the cultured meat industry will scale, one thing is already clear: the projections put forward by Humbird and peers have proven spectacularly wrong. In the short time since the TEA was published, multiple companies have achieved results that exceed its assumptions by wide margins—across media cost, cell density, and overall production efficiency.

Also note David Manheim's comment here, making the case that TEAs are not really aimed at forecasting:
 

 Critically, the presentation of the Technolo-Economic Analyses did not clarify that these analyses are conditional estimates, not predictions, and that high price scenarios were all based on the present-day costs as of the publication time, (which have since dropped significantly,) not predicted future cost
 

The Unjournal is evaluating the cost of cultured meat as a "pivotal question" (PQ).    

Coming out soon: Our commissioned evaluations of Dullahan and Zhang's forecasting exercise (which was informed by their synthesis of TEAs).

We asked these evaluators to consider 

• the relevance and currency of that work,
• the (updated) implications for the potential for cultured meat (informing our PQ) and
• the approaches D&Z took, and how future work should follow their example or make different choices

To leak the results a tiny bit, my impression is that the evaluators are fairly positive about the potential for cultured meat and see some of the choices D&Z made as overly pessimistic, with at least one ~typo in the information provided to the evaluators leaning towards pessimism. They also point to a range of newer TEAs and results. And one evaluator (Manheim) makes a case that even expensive "luxury" CM provide a path forward.

Following this, we'll ask different sets of evaluators to consider the body of TEAs and related recent research, and to provide structured evaluations of a small set of these, as well as stating their beliefs about a set of operationalized PQs sub-questions.  And this will feed into our Metaculus forecasting community and our overall synthesis.

See here for our database of PQs, operationalization work, and PQ research being prioritized.