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Biomade's Genya Dana and Steven Evans on how the US can unlock the $4 trillion bioeconomy
98 Plays1 year ago
Mike and Anthony talk court intrigue at OpenAI - will the firing, hiring, and rehiring of Sam Altman derail the development of AI? Or is it all just shadows on the wall? Then, Mike is joined by two experts on the US bioeconomy, Genya Dana and Steven Evans, to learn more about Biomade's efforts to get the bioeconomy across the commercial valley of death.
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Transcript
Introduction and Setting
00:00:10
Speaker
I am Anthony. I am your host. I'm a senior director here at Lux Research. And once again, I am joined by my colleague, Mike. Mike is here with me recording from New York. And Karthik is still out on vacation, which is, you know, we wish him all the best.
OpenAI's Pivotal Role
00:00:32
Speaker
We are recording this on the 20th of November. And this is important because
00:00:39
Speaker
We are going to be talking a lot about OpenAI, the most important company ever, depending on who you ask. Before we get into that, Mike, how are you today? No complaints. Getting ready for Thanksgiving and all of that, heading out on Wednesday. Yep. So it's Monday. It's the 20th. It's Monday.
Turmoil at OpenAI: Leadership Shakeup
00:01:07
Speaker
On Friday, we had
00:01:09
Speaker
the shocking news that OpenAI's CEO and I believe founder, Sam Altman, co-founder was fired by the board, right? They put out this kind of vague statement saying that basically, you know, there had been a breakdown in communication, right? He had not been consistently candid with them as I believe the exact terminology. And he was let go. In case you missed it, OpenAI is
00:01:39
Speaker
the company that, so first of all, we'll get into the structure, which is interesting here, but there is the open AI nonprofit, right? Which is what the board of directors sits on and controls. And then a subsidiary of the open AI nonprofit is the for-profit open AI company that Sam is the CEO, or I should say was the CEO of, right? This is owned 51% by
00:02:08
Speaker
the open AI nonprofit and 49% by Microsoft. You may remember that Microsoft invested $10 billion into the company part of the company last year, or maybe even earlier this year, actually, I can't remember. So they put out this statement and they said, he's fired.
Speculations and Repercussions
00:02:31
Speaker
He has not been consistently candid with us. This sparked a ton of speculation,
00:02:38
Speaker
of news stories, of tweets. One of the things that we determined when we started this podcast is that we were not going to do tweet review. But I've decided that we can do a little bit of tweet review today just as a treat, a little pre-Thanksgiving treat for ourselves. So we're going to look at some really dumb tweets. But there's been a pretty wide range of speculation about what actually caused this. The board quickly sort of clarified that there was no illegal activity, no malfeasance.
00:03:09
Speaker
And then began to walk things back. There's this whole like apparent negotiation between Sam and the board to potentially return. But then ultimately he did not return as CEO.
Shift in AI Innovation to Microsoft
00:03:22
Speaker
They hired the former CEO of Twitch as of Monday morning. And Sam has joined Microsoft to lead their AI development efforts.
00:03:34
Speaker
Yes, along with Greg Brockman, who is formerly the chair of the OpenAI board. And another co-founder, I believe, but other key people there. And it seems quite likely that a lot of key people from OpenAI and a lot of people, period, from OpenAI are going to be going with Sam and Greg over to Microsoft. Which is pretty wild.
00:04:02
Speaker
given the fact that Microsoft and OpenAI are, I don't want to say they're the same entity, but they are, you know, Microsoft owns basically half of OpenAI. It is using OpenAI's technology, right? That is what is powering Bing, you know, the new co-pilot, all that stuff is powered by OpenAI's technology. So you sort of had this huge reshuffle and this huge potential, you know, source of bad blood and disagreement and all that stuff.
00:04:31
Speaker
for as far as I can tell, very little material change in the operations of any of these companies as of yet. I mean, it remains to be seen.
00:04:43
Speaker
Yeah, it remains to be seen, but I do think it looks quite likely that the locus of the innovation that was happening at OpenAI is going to shift to Microsoft and shift from the nonprofit to Microsoft, which is obviously very much a for-profit company, right? I mean, Microsoft has- That's not the truth. That's not the case. The locus of innovation was already within the for-profit company, right? The OpenAI company that Sam Altman was the CEO of, that's a for-profit company.
Philosophical and Business Tensions in AI
00:05:13
Speaker
And this is where I want to get into some of the contradictions because basically what we're seeing, my theory, what we're seeing in real time is that there are a lot of contradictions at play with open AI, the philosophical framework scaffolding surrounding it, the technology of AI itself, the individuals involved, and those contradictions are leading to this activity. I want to make a little bit of a disclaimer, which is that we're recording this again on Monday the 20th.
00:05:40
Speaker
I believe that if you gave your take over the weekend and tweeted about it, that was way too early. If you were to wait until after things had really fully settled with a full benefit of hindsight, that's lame. This is the perfect time to do it. That's why we're doing it right now. But in case we're wrong about any of this stuff, let me just get that out of the way. So here's the thing.
00:06:01
Speaker
A lot of the commentary about this over the weekend was why has this happened? People were trying to figure out, people were speculating, why has the board done this? And there are a bunch of theories, right? Most of them were very stupid. But the particularly, the one that we saw most commonly, I think, was that there was an issue on, quote, AI alignment, the idea that we need to ensure that AI does not have negative consequences for humanity.
00:06:27
Speaker
Now I'm doing air quotes here because the risks, when you use the phrase AI alignment, you're talking about a specific set of risks. The people are talking about a specific set of risks. And those are in particular, the stupid fake risks of AI. These are the existential human risks, i.e. the risk of AI, you know, turning us onto paperclips, ending humanity, right?
00:06:54
Speaker
And this is a thing that people believe. And specifically, it is a thing that is believed that these risks are real. This is a belief shared by all members of the OpenAI board. They've all signed various letters and documents to this effect. And it's also a belief shared by the people developing AI at OpenAI, including Sam Alton. He is of the belief that there are these existential risks from AI. And the speculation over the weekend is that there was a disagreement about how much, how quickly, how rapidly,
00:07:24
Speaker
AI was being developed by open AI. This is extraordinarily stupid, right? I'll get to my theory on why they believe this, because I don't think that they are stupid. I think these are very, very smart people, right? I do think they believe a stupid thing, because I think they have an extremely strong incentive to believe in a stupid thing. But there's really no mechanistic chain of reasoning that I've seen yet, which can lead us from what is essentially a very good
00:07:55
Speaker
a very good autocomplete system in chat GPT to ending the world, right? And any step along that chain would require pretty significant human intervention. Like one of the things I've seen is like, oh, what if the AI allows terrorists to develop a bio weapon? It's like, terrorists can already get bio weapons. Like we had a series of anthrax attacks in the United States in the month after 9-11. And like, like, this is like-
00:08:23
Speaker
Yeah, this is just not a thing you need AI to do, right? Same thing with nuclear weapons. You can do really substantial harms without AI, right? And generally, we have a bunch of systems in place designed to prevent that, right? Again, without AI. And then the other thing is, oh, what if AI takes over question mark? This is not even a... This is completely unclear to me how this would actually happen. But this is apparently a thing that these people care about, right? And part of the speculation says,
00:08:50
Speaker
This is what the deal is. I think this is completely ridiculous. What do you think about this before we get into another set of speculations? What do you think about this, Mike? Also not a big AI doomer. No, it's I mean, I think the it's a little the board's motivations are pretty unclear. I think what we could say is it seems quite likely that they were concerned about the the misalignment to use that word again between
00:09:19
Speaker
what Sam was doing and open AI's non-profit mission, which their charter says that they're basically to advance AI for the general betterment of humanity. Knowing the sort of concerns and discussions that tend to run around in AI circles, it seems likely that that kind of comes down to some of this
00:09:48
Speaker
AI, x-risk, existential risk, as people call it.
00:09:54
Speaker
But it's also, you know, he's just moving too fast on the for-profit side, trying to do too much other stuff, and we're losing sight of this mission.
Economic Motivations and AI's Future
00:10:02
Speaker
I think that's the overarching thing. How much role, you know, did they really think he was on the verge of, you know, creating an AI that was going to wipe out humanity? I mean, hopefully they're aware enough to at the very least say, like, we're not real close to that point anyway. But
00:10:22
Speaker
But yeah, I think that's the fundamental tension between their nonprofit mission and the desire to make a lot of money for this for-profit company that, yes, that's where the innovation was having, but the for-profit company was a subsidiary of and was wholly controlled by, which is why they were able to do this, wholly controlled by the board of the nonprofit. The question I think that's worth asking is why did they set things up this way? Why did they
00:10:51
Speaker
set it up as this nonprofit. Why do all these really smart people believe in AI x-resc, a thing that is sort of very easy to disprove, or at least otherwise, has a huge amount of holes in it, right? And I think this is actually very fundamental, like a very fundamental contradiction and issue with AI, which is that AI requires a huge amount of resources, right? It's very, very expensive.
00:11:19
Speaker
It requires a huge amount of physical products in the form of GPUs, right? It requires a huge amount of electricity. It requires a huge amount of exploited human labor, right? ScaleAI, the company that does the click work management that powers this AI. OpenAI uses them, right? They're one of the biggest customers of OpenAI. Or OpenAI is one of the biggest customers of ScaleAI. And ScaleAI is the company that, you know,
00:11:47
Speaker
has these basically digital sweatshops in Kenya, right? Paying people less than a living wage. Right. I mean, and this is the point about the cost. This is exactly why Microsoft specifically was involved in this, right? Because Microsoft is kind of paying for its stake in this for-profit subsidiary or the nonprofit.
00:12:09
Speaker
in large part in kind, they're able to provide the compute on their Azure Cloud Platform that open AI, it basically got to the point where they couldn't afford all of the server time essentially to run and train and develop these models, which is what led them to create this for-profit subsidiary. Basically, they could get that from Microsoft. It's this extraordinarily expensive thing.
00:12:38
Speaker
And the question becomes, how do you justify spending so much money, effort, material, and human suffering on something, right? And I think the answer is you have to tell yourself that it is extremely important, right? And the amount of important that it has to be to justify it needs to scale
00:13:04
Speaker
with the amount of effort, labor, and human suffering that you're putting into it, right? And so given the scope, the cost, the scale of AI development, you necessarily arrive at this point where you have basically people saying that it's going to end the world or has the potential to end the world because that's the thing that they need to say in order to justify the amount of effort they're putting into it, right?
00:13:31
Speaker
You can't, if your thing is like, yeah, we're going to approve Microsoft's business operations by 10%, you can't justify investing this huge amount of money into it, this huge amount of physical material into it. But the problem is that so far, it is this thing that is basically
00:13:54
Speaker
you know, SAS 2.0, it's a business services thing, right? You see this in Sam Altman's, you know, he said, oh, like, you know, I think 93% of Fortune 500 companies are like developing applications with, with OpenAI, right? And that's like, that's a fine thing in a sort of vacuum, right? But it's not ending the world. It's not transforming human society, right? It's a startup, which is very, very negative in its cost basis right now.
00:14:21
Speaker
You know, we know that it's extraordinarily negative. Even after the investment with Microsoft, they had to stop accepting paying customers for GPT-4, right? Basically because, you know, it was costing them too much money to run those services. And the costs of what they were getting from their paying customers were far outstripping the costs it was generating, right? And maybe it's just a question of scale. They couldn't scale any more within their current framework.
00:14:49
Speaker
But we know that one of the things that apparently was fueling these disagreements between Sam and the board is that Sam wanted to raise a bunch of money, potentially from the Saudis, invest in the upstream, the chips, all this stuff. And the basic issue is really this contradiction. Your ability to raise money to fuel this effort depends on your belief
00:15:19
Speaker
that it is world-changing, life-changing, this potentially transformative, that it has these X-Risks, all this stuff. That's all tied together. And so your paycheck, which is fundamentally dependent on your ability to raise this money, because it's certainly not coming from the revenue you're generating, is tied into this belief as well. So if you are doing AI, you end up having to believe all of this stuff about X-Risks, about the impact. And you see this at,
00:15:49
Speaker
I think this is true for basically any startup founder. Any startup founder has to believe that their thing is worth it. They have to believe that their thing is worth the money that it's raising, that the potential impact is going to be there. It's just that most startup founders are, if you're doing a cupcake delivery business, you only need to raise $10 million or $1 million or half a million dollars or whatever, and you only need to have half a million dollars of belief.
00:16:15
Speaker
If you're raising 10 billion as like a series A, right, or whatever, you need to have a really, really incredible belief, right? And that sort of leads to this whole ecosystem. It's why they found it as a nonprofit because of this belief, right? It's why there's this tension now between the nonprofit and the for-profit wing. Because the for-profit wing is being pulled in this direction of doing these profit generating activities or doing this commercial activity, which is misaligned.
00:16:44
Speaker
fundamentally with the beliefs that they have about the system, right? And also the costs, you know, you're seeing that frame on the cost versus the value output, right? So that's my theory, right? This whole thing is, and that's where you get AI doomerism and you get AI utopianism from this as well. It's all from this, the extraordinary costs of actually doing AI. Costs, which to my mind have not been justified in any particular sense, right?
00:17:12
Speaker
in terms of the valuable output that they've produced, right? Yeah, I mean, it's sort of, I mean, because of the thing I'd push back on there is, is like, if, I mean, Microsoft's a $2.7 trillion company, if you open it, even if all this AI does is improve their, you know, their operations 10%, like that's probably more than worth the money that they invested in it. So it's, you know, on the financial side, it's, you know,
00:17:40
Speaker
the investments as large as they are, I think could be justifiable, even if the AI is kind of more of an incremental sustaining type innovation in the near term to medium term. I think it is more of this sort of psychological piece of people, that is like the culture and it's been successful as far as it goes, but that is kind of a core part of the
00:18:07
Speaker
the Silicon Valley entrepreneurial culture is like you have to position whatever it is that you're doing as, you know, kind of transcendent and world changing and world improving and world saving, even if it is like a cupcake delivery business. Yeah. I mean, that's what we saw with WeWork. I think Microsoft has kind of gotten lucky here. They didn't invest $10 billion to guarantee improve their business. Right. They invested $10 billion in a pretty risky way. Right. Like they, they wanted to be the absolute first. And it seems like that risk has paid off so far.
00:18:36
Speaker
in the sense that everyone thinks Microsoft is going to win AI and, you know, they have, open AI has stayed at the cutting edge. You know, they haven't been displaced by these other AI platforms. And there are other AI platforms that perform at that as well as open AI, but they're just like the biggest name, right? If it was a risk-free investment, then the 10 billion would definitely be worth it. I would agree with you there. I think as a pretty risky investment that just happens to have worked so far, it's a lot more questionable. Although that is something we'll have to see truly what the actual outcome is, right?
00:19:06
Speaker
But yeah, I mean, I think that's that's the point here. Like these people have have had to drink their own Kool-Aid to a really extensive degree. And the contradictions between that and running the actual business, the for profit business, which is what they actually want, are tearing them apart, literally tearing them apart. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm kind of interested to to get your your take on, you know, does this change mean anything or what is the significance of this change?
Leadership Changes: Real Impact?
00:19:34
Speaker
for sort of the future trajectory of AI development. And I guess I kind of tipped my hand there. I'm not really sure that- I don't think it means anything. Yeah, I mean, so part of the deal with Microsoft, right? I agree with that. I think that maybe not nothing, but yeah, I don't think it sort of fundamentally should change your outlook from a business sense on
00:19:59
Speaker
the impact of AI. I mean, Microsoft already has it as a part of this deal. They have a complete license to everything that that open AI has developed with the exception. Yes, artificial general. So the artificial general intelligence. So if they if they invent God, Microsoft does not get that.
00:20:22
Speaker
Though their definition of artificial general intelligence is a little loose. It's better than a human that could do a task. Is AGI, is there a definition? Yeah, something like that. So there could be some interesting arguments about that.
00:20:41
Speaker
In the future, but yeah, I mean so basically Sam and his colleagues, which it looks like it will probably be quite a lot of them who end up joining him in this new venture at Microsoft will be able to basically keep doing
Microsoft's AI Commercialization Potential
00:20:54
Speaker
what they were doing. There's not really going to be any impediments that they may have got the source code and the model weights and everything right. They have access to all of that so they can just keep kind of doing whatever they were doing.
00:21:04
Speaker
it probably does accelerate the commercial impact, the commercialization of it in the sense that they're not gonna be held back anymore by this weird nonprofit corporate structure. Microsoft is gonna probably be pretty willing to continue throwing money at them and maybe even be able to do that more efficiently now. So his chip startup or AI chips or the kind of chat GPT bot store.
00:21:34
Speaker
they were launching, some of that stuff might actually move faster now than it would have before. Here's the thing. It is going to move just as fast as it would have because the nonprofit structure was always fake. Okay. The nonprofit was never going to have any capability. Wasn't fake enough for Sam to keep his job. But he did keep his job like he has in 48 hours. He's maybe even more powerful than he was previously. Like
00:22:00
Speaker
That's the thing. So if you really cared about AI X-Risk, you would actually just not do AI. So from the very, very premise, if you legitimately think that you're building a nuclear bomb, the thing to do is not build a nuclear bomb.
00:22:16
Speaker
It doesn't make the world safer. And the thing to do is to prevent other people from building a nuclear bomb via treaties or whatever. And then the fact that they spun out a for-profit company owned by a nonprofit, that was always a contradiction in terms. It was never going to work. For sure. The fact that the moment they tried to push back on any of the things, not even change course, just get rid of the guy, it instantly failed. Their power was broken immediately in practical terms.
00:22:41
Speaker
And that shouldn't be a surprise. It was always fake.
Ideological Facade of Nonprofit Structures
00:22:44
Speaker
The nonprofit nature of this was always part of an ideological cover, a thing that they had to believe about themselves in order to justify the immiseration that they're inflicting on people. Right. You know, like that's what it's all about. So it's not going to slow down or even accelerate development of anything. It might give opportunity for other brands, other AI groups to have more air in the market because open AI is maybe discredited now.
00:23:12
Speaker
That's the only thing that will really change. But other than that, it changes nothing. It's great. I had a really good time, you know, just thinking about all this stuff and reading people's hysterical reactions to it. It's, it's palisantry. You know, we don't have court jesters in Unix anymore. We have this type of thing. So it was good fun. It was, yeah, it's a pretty fascinating thing.
Introduction to BioMADE
00:23:42
Speaker
All right everyone, we now have a exciting discussion coming up with a couple of folks who are real leaders in the bioeconomy. We are talking to Genia Dana and Steve Evans from BioMADE, which is a really interesting organization that I'll let them tell us a little bit more about, but dedicated to advancing bioeconomy and bio manufacturing here in the US.
00:24:12
Speaker
So, Jenny and Steve, welcome. Thank you. Good to be here. So, yeah, maybe we can just kick off with that talk, which you started on Google about, about BioMaid and how that organization came about and what was the motivation for creating it. Happy to get that started. So, the way that we think about it is the opportunity space around
00:24:41
Speaker
the ability to use biology and biological processes to produce the building blocks for materials, chemicals, energy, a whole wide range of different things that everybody uses every day in their life. And for that reason, the opportunity is really big in terms of economic impact.
00:25:01
Speaker
There have been some studies out there that have shown that up to $4 trillion a year annually could be generated by the bioeconomy within the next 10 to 20 years or so. So in that context, in the timeframe, 2019, 2020, the US government and the Department of Defense really identified that the investments that have gone into building our ability to work with biology and produce these materials
00:25:29
Speaker
needed to get a big push in order to reach that economic impact and really move to a commercial scale that would enable such an impact. And in that context then, we had within the community already, Engineering Biology Research Consortium, which was a public-private partnership. And they brought together in response to a call that the government put out, you know, how do we tackle this challenge?
00:25:58
Speaker
They brought together nearly 100 organizations to think about what's the vision of what's needed to get to this commercial scale that's really going to matter. And so BioMADE is the results of that. And we're an independent nonprofit, public-private partnership. It was first announced in October of 2020. And we've just been growing since then. And our goals as this nonprofit organization are really to support economic and national security
00:26:25
Speaker
and to focus on things like supply chains, innovation, workforce, how to produce critical products, all using those biological processes and biological inputs. So we are a manufacturing innovation institute, one of those institutes that's in place to really help different areas of technology move into that commercial space.
00:26:51
Speaker
And we're really, really pleased to be pushing this forward at a pretty rapid clip within our offices here in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and out in the Bay Area in Emmerville, California. So maybe one of the other questions is sort of why now, right, for this, that people have been working on
00:27:14
Speaker
you know, biomanufacturing fermentation, and there's been a lot of work over the last really couple decades looking to apply that to chemicals and materials production, which has been I think this is maybe part of the answer, right? It's been a challenging path for a lot of companies. What's
00:27:32
Speaker
What I think maybe motivated the sense that like now is the time that was ripe for this kind of big push and to really trying to make some of these technologies more successful in manufacturing. Dave, do you want to take that one? Sure. I think you hinted at it at the beginning, Jinya, when parts of the government looked around,
00:27:55
Speaker
There have been ongoing substantial federal spends in areas of early technology development, but the ability to move those interesting strains, molecules, and processes up into commercial relevance has been the thing that's lagged.
00:28:19
Speaker
And so the federal spend is really strong in the innovation ecosystem.
BioMADE's Strategic Collaborations
00:28:27
Speaker
This is a great place to come and build a new thing. But getting that across some version, it's the Valley of Death, if you want to call it that. Or I like to think about it. It's just getting things to where there's a commercially relevant fit for what you're doing.
00:28:45
Speaker
So the Department of Defense has been heavily involved in those investments in making things that can impact biology on the software and the process side. And they want to be able to reap the benefit of that, to procure things. That means you have to be able to manufacture them at scale. But then not only to procure them for their use,
00:29:12
Speaker
but to help build this ecosystem here in the US as a way to strengthen the bioeconomy. So things that we can build here with resources here, with feedstocks here to be able to strengthen that supply chain. So a lot of things kind of converged at that point in time.
00:29:38
Speaker
that really said, here's an effort to move in this public-private partnership under the Manufacturing Innovation Institute framework. And so I think that's the place that we are. And so that gives us a unique position in that scale-up ecosystem to be able to pull together resources and expertise and try to move that thing uphill.
00:30:08
Speaker
So how do you do that? Like what are the specific tools that BioMate uses? You're giving money in kind support for me. Like what are the specific activities that you're leveraging to try to push that goal forward? So we do this in three main ways. And it's via support grant supporting programs of work.
00:30:33
Speaker
You referenced that funding piece of it. Building a robust ecosystem of players and tackling the infrastructure challenge. Those are really the three key areas of our focus and we are a member-based organization.
00:30:51
Speaker
I'm really very proud of this. And there's been a tremendous amount of work on the behalf of BioMADE to bring together nearly 250 different organizations from industry to government, educational institutions, philanthropy. And the goal of that is to be able to foster those partnerships that propel those technologies from lab to the commercial market.
00:31:17
Speaker
So we want to ensure that as we're bringing together this ecosystem and bringing to bear significant resources to work on technology development, that we also wrap that in considerations around workforce, you know, building a skilled workforce, and that we, as we're designing, are incorporating considerations about safety and sustainability and the societal implications
00:31:47
Speaker
of the work that we're doing. And we're really guided by, I would say, the industry and their roadmaps, their blueprints, and this commercial scale aspects and understanding what they need to see coming out of research, development, technology readiness is incredibly important for us to bring into these conversations and into the design of all of the work that we do.
00:32:17
Speaker
So I know that Steve has been operating in this space for a very long time and has some really salient viewpoints on particularly what it takes for industry to be a good partner and an incredibly critical partner in this process. So I'll turn it over to him to fill in on that part as well. Thanks, Jania. And what I would like to do is really pick up on that point about the roadmaps and blueprints.
00:32:46
Speaker
And so what I would say is that since before it was born, BioMADE has tried to be a listening organization. We pull together experts in fields, whether it's in manufacturing or in engineering biology or in workforce development or in looking at societal implications. We bring together people who've been in those roles and have
00:33:15
Speaker
strong understandings so that we're trying to advance based on the collective learnings of our ecosystem over time. We're not trying to create something as though only we have the ideas. And so that really rolls into the way that our teams are comprised. We have in all of our programmatic thrusts, we have working teams comprised of
00:33:45
Speaker
industry, government, we have academics on them and they come together. They build those industry directed roadmaps and blueprints in all of our technical areas.
00:34:00
Speaker
and in all of our programmatic areas. And then that is what forms the basis of our project calls. We're in the midst of an active project call now, number four. And just in the two years that we've been operating, we've been able to use those roadmaps and blueprints to drive collaborative projects
00:34:24
Speaker
into the ecosystem to work on technology or issues that matter. So over 65 projects have been initiated over that time, and over $150 million have been poured into those projects. And so we're trying to make a sustained and substantial impact into areas that matter. Yeah.
00:34:49
Speaker
Yeah, and that's been one of the big themes. I think we've also been exploring it at Lux a lot. It's just the importance, particularly when you're going through these type of system transitions. You know, they're talking about the energy transition or the circular economy or the bioeconomy of building these new types of ecosystems because it is collaborations often amongst different types of organization or different types of expertise that you wouldn't
00:35:15
Speaker
normally have had before that can be really critical to making these types of projects work, right? And that's the importance of BioMaid being a .org, a public-private partnership that allows us to have that convening capability. And again, if we pull people together, though, and we don't listen to them, that's a missed opportunity. And that's why it's so important that we have
00:35:45
Speaker
the players in the room who can help move and that we are listening and collaborating trying to build this ecosystem. And as you mentioned in the transition framework, that's I think one of the real challenges because the timeframes that different players in the ecosystem have, their risk tolerance,
00:36:13
Speaker
and their lines of sight often aren't directly consistent with an entire industry makeover. That takes more than a five-year plan, let's just say. So one of the things that you also mentioned, Genya, is around the broader sustainability impact,
Sustainability and Innovation Goals of BioMADE
00:36:35
Speaker
right? And I think there's sometimes when you talk about bio-based or bio-manufacturing,
00:36:40
Speaker
people default to, that's naturally it's going to be more sustainable than making something from petroleum or fossil resources. And of course it often can be, but there's also some challenges around using biomass to feed stocks in terms of water, land use, biodiversity, social impact, as you mentioned.
00:37:03
Speaker
Is that part of, how do you kind of navigate those? That's often a challenge we find for clients. Like, yeah, this gives me reduced emissions, but maybe it has these other impacts on water ecosystems. How do you think about kind of navigating those, balancing some of those different types of factors? Those are really important considerations and top of mind for many players in our ecosystem and society broadly.
00:37:30
Speaker
The way that I like to think about this at BioMADE is that the breadth at which we are leveraging biology to do things that were traditionally the domain of chemicals is so large.
00:37:45
Speaker
These are substances that are really in everything, whether they're airplanes or a piece of clothing, just thinking about the fuel, the coatings, the fibers, the rubber, all of the different materials that go into everyday products, big and small. And the opportunity that we have to really source and create these components in new ways
00:38:11
Speaker
that pull from a really wide range of inputs and processes, taking things like waste gases from steel mills and transforming that into ethanol for transportation fuel.
00:38:25
Speaker
using microorganisms that secrete calcium carbonate and stitch together into self-healing concrete. There are so many different ways of conceptualizing and we do this and our members do this on a daily basis. The bringing together of resources that are right here in the US and that in many instances can be
00:38:54
Speaker
safer or more tied to local economies and revitalization of different economies and pulling those inputs through into these large scale systems. That's really the way that I think about the broader context of everything that we're doing at BioMADE and what the economic opportunity is really, really large, far beyond
00:39:24
Speaker
I guess thinking about strictly biomass inputs into the system. We really want to zoom way out and think about all of the different opportunities that exist in this space. I'll leave it there. See if Steve has other thoughts that have come from his long experience in this space as well.
00:39:46
Speaker
Well, just briefly, I think, you know, if somebody asked me to give them the briefest tagline I could about what we try to do, it is we are trying to make things with biology or from biology. And that's where some of the members in our ecosystem take very different approaches. So, Kimian zymatic approaches like Salyajin,
00:40:10
Speaker
or direct chemical transformation of biofeed stocks like in the origin materials.
00:40:16
Speaker
But we also have companies that are directly tied into the larger landscape of agriculture. And they realize that it is very important to be working with the agricultural community to do things like regenerative agriculture. And so we don't see these things as in a conflict.
00:40:40
Speaker
We see these as a systems level Challenge and so what I'll leave that with then is that overall we have been working with systems level thinking and the way that that comes out is in techno-economic or lifecycle analyses and so we spend a lot of time our members spend a lot of time trying to understand
00:41:05
Speaker
where the materials that they're using will come from, the energy and other impacts that are part of manufacturing that material, distributing that material, and then it's end of life. How does end of life play in?
00:41:24
Speaker
And are there opportunities all along those large steps to bring in efficiencies, recycle loops, thinking about how you can
00:41:37
Speaker
say make a plant zero water discharge as a challenge, how you can use local sources of renewable energy or local sources of hydrogen or things of that nature. So bringing in those components, doing the math on it to make it, it's got to make economic sense to have a sustainable systems transition.
00:42:02
Speaker
But it is much broader than just what is interesting in your bioreactor. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that type of systems thinking is, you know, that's one of the things where I feel like an organization like BioMADE can have such a contribution because a lot of times
00:42:22
Speaker
you know, innovation teams that are working within a certain paradigm. You know, I work a lot with folks in the chemicals industry, right? And they're, they're obviously used to a certain set of inputs and processes and very intrigued by the possibility of bio manufacturing. And, but kind of thinking through all of those system level considerations is is a real challenge for them. And, you know, having having organizations like bio made or other partnerships and ecosystems that
00:42:51
Speaker
that are thinking through that together, I think can be really valuable. So one of the things that was interesting to me, I mean, I know BioMADE is a US-based, you know, US government-sponsored organization. But just in kind of researching this, I noticed you both have experience working abroad and with international organizations. Zhenya, you did your PhD in South Africa, I believe. And Steve, you've done work with the UN,
00:43:21
Speaker
convention on biological diversity and bio and things like that. So I'm actually curious a little bit for your take also on the international perspective of this as well, right? Because there's a lot of potential for the bioeconomy globally, including the global south. And there's a lot of places like Thailand and Malaysia have big initiatives around bioeconomy and things as well. What do you see as the opportunities internationally as well?
00:43:52
Speaker
So I wanted to say that as you've pointed out and looking around at what's happening around the world, there are a lot of different ways that countries are tackling the bioeconomy and bio-industrial manufacturing. And we see a lot of work that is grounded really in their local or regional needs and the way that
00:44:19
Speaker
People will think about, is it forestry? Is it oceans? Is it agriculture? What really anchors them in their quest to ensure they're pulling the most appropriate resources and fostering the economies that they want to see? They are all doing it a little bit differently.
00:44:45
Speaker
And that's really good for the community because that offers a lot of lessons that we can take forward and
00:44:53
Speaker
in terms of bio-made being that place of convening, learning lessons from others across the world is something that we're really interested in doing. So you could think of a little bit as a global de-risking process that's happening as countries tackle their own bio-economies in their own way. There are very specific places where we're really interested in how we can collaborate
00:45:20
Speaker
Talent and training is really, I think, a high priority area. And we have a lot of interest and a lot of work happening at BioMate around the education and workforce development pieces of this. And that is going to be broadly applicable and lots of sharing and collaboration that can be done about how to ensure that we're inspiring younger people to consider.
00:45:46
Speaker
That biology is cool and they can make a career out of it. And that we are training educators and helping provide curricula and talent pipelines that are appropriate for what industry and local and regional economies are looking for. So at Biome we're doing a lot of work in terms of stitching together
00:46:13
Speaker
maybe older curricula from a lot of biotechnology work into curricula that are fit for purpose for a new bioeconomy and bio-industrial manufacturing landscape. And this is something that is eminently shareable and collaborative around the world. I think as you look at this, an area that as you look around other places, and particularly to Europe,
00:46:40
Speaker
the US is still lagging in certain scales of
00:46:47
Speaker
bio-industrial technology development. So getting things from that lab bench, we're excellent at it. We know how to make large-scale facilities here. It's that intermediate reusable pilot and intermediate scale that is a bit of a challenge. A number of places have pointed that out. And so I think bio-made working in that space is
00:47:14
Speaker
really important. And the world is a globally regulated world, but everybody regulates their own thing. And so products made here have to be able to navigate that global landscape of regulations. And so we can't drive that. That's not our remit or ability, but working with members that especially have a global representation.
00:47:44
Speaker
I think is an important component for what we can do. And then even domestically, there are activities going on in terms of regulatory clarity here. And so that's an important component for us. And what I would say, lastly, if we think about
00:48:07
Speaker
The bioeconomy is also going to have an intimate tie with data. And so understanding how data will be used, how it will be secured as we do process scale up, and then ultimately commercialization. Those are areas of global interest and areas that we are glad that we're able to be participating in.
00:48:34
Speaker
Yeah, so maybe I'll just conclude by asking, you know, what's your outlook on the future? What do you think are going to be the most significant changes or developments that we're going to see over the next, you know, sort of five to 10 years in this space? So I will share a little bit more in answering this question about some of the work we're doing in the pilot scale production space. I think Steve already kind of teed this up and one of the pillars of work
00:49:03
Speaker
for BioMADE is the intermediate scale production facility type of infrastructure. And the fact that it's been noted that we are in the United States, at least in a position where we can really spur investment into critical infrastructure that's needed to fill that gap between the R&D stage and the commercial scale production.
00:49:29
Speaker
That is that value of Valley of Death. The Valley of Death that you referred to. Yeah, absolutely. So I'm really excited to see what is possible in that space. And in BioMADE, we've been working really closely with our US government partners and at the state and local level to understand what the opportunities are for those types of pilot scale facilities to be located within communities.
00:49:59
Speaker
And communities that are close to relevant feedstocks and workforces is going to be really, really important. And I will say, as a person who grew up in Southern Mississippi and has spent a lot of time in rural America and at the edge of agricultural communities, the opportunity to revitalize some of these communities, but also to continue to offer opportunities
00:50:24
Speaker
in this economy is really, really important. And that is what is really exciting to me. I think we're going to make some really good progress towards that in the timeframe that you mentioned. I'll toss it over to Steve now because he thinks in the longer time horizon sometimes than I do. So over to you, Steve. Thanks. Well, I think it's important. And, you know, five and 10 years are very important time windows because they represent the limits, say, of a venture fund.
00:50:53
Speaker
That's the outer limit of what they would like to look at. It's also a timeframe that is important for many types of federal and state funding initiatives. And so it's still very important that in a five to 10-year timeframe, tangible evidence that we're moving into this new development space, this new framework of the economy is very important.
00:51:20
Speaker
On the other hand, we need to realize, you know, even if you can turn your design build test learn cycle in two or three months, you can't build a factory
00:51:33
Speaker
in two or three months, at least using technologies that we have today. And so once you begin thinking about construction at scale, you're on a very different time frame that can consume a pretty good chunk of, say, a five-year window. And so as we think about we've got great activities of people in lab coats moving things in the lab, we've really to be at scale and impacting
00:52:01
Speaker
we have to be thinking about things at the rail car scale where what's coming into a factory and going out of the factory is at a rail car level. That's important for food, it's important for fuels, it's important for materials that would be going into this economy because that's the economy that the petroleum
00:52:26
Speaker
industry moves their materials around in. And so thinking about that and then making sure we're on that trajectory to be impacting this dramatic change is very important. That window will be longer than five to ten years, but it's important that we're making discrete, tangible
00:52:50
Speaker
contributions, evidences that people can look at to retain their interest and then to retain importantly the talent that would come in and build these things and the money that needs to come to finance industrial scale manufacturing. Yeah and that's something you know we've
00:53:13
Speaker
We, like you said, you know, we know we can do and in the US and many other places right once these things are sufficiently proven there's there's definitely I mean, we hear it all the time. There's definitely an appetite for
00:53:26
Speaker
for biomanufacturing and for the ability to have these more bio-based and sustainable ingredients and materials and inputs. And I think there's a lot of appetite for that. And if we can get over some of these challenges that I think BioMate is really trying to address, there's definitely demand there. And I think for technologies that are proven, there's the funding to help.
00:53:53
Speaker
help deliver on it. So it is going to be a very interesting space to follow, I think in general, very interested in following how, you know, BioMaid's progress and the projects and efforts that you're funding as well. But yeah, and so maybe we'll get a chance to check back in in a year or two and see how things are going here on the
00:54:16
Speaker
on the podcast as well. But yeah, I want to thank you for your time and appreciate the sharing, sharing, sharing about your work and really interesting conversation. So thank you again very much for joining us here. My pleasure.
00:54:33
Speaker
Innovation Matters is a production of Lux Research, the leading sustainable innovation research and advisory firm. You can follow this podcast on Apple Music, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you want more, check out www.luxresearchinc.com slash blog for all the latest news, opinions, and articles.