That calculation assumed a tractability of 10%, which can be interpreted as: cultivated meat will enter the market sooner or later, and when it does, it will capture 10% of the animal-based meat market, i.e. replace 10% of animal-based meat by cultivated meat. That 10% represents the animal-based meat that will not be substituted by plant-based meat, but will be substituted by cultivated meat. This is in line with the Bryant-Sanctorum study that you mentioned. Even with this low tractability, corresponding to a small complementarity between plant-based and cultivated meat, funding acceleration in cultivated meat R&D remains highly effective. The reason is its neglectedness: in terms of investments and funding, cultivated meat is roughly 10 times more neglected than plant-based meat. If you are right, and plant-based meat will capture more of the animal-based meat market than cultivated meat, it would mean that the current global allocation of R&D funding between plant-based and cultivated meat seems about right. You may believe ten times more in plant-based meat than in cultivated meat innovation, which means you may allocate more (but not all!) funding to plant-based meat.
My major concern about cultivated meat innovation cost-effectiveness, is the longer timeline. The types of cultivated meat that could replace animal-based meat and could not be replaced by plant-based meat, are whole tissue cultivated meat, and those will probably take a few decades before development and becoming competitive with animal-based whole tissue meat. It is likely that within a few decades, we will have transformative artificial intelligence (TAI) that could do research 10 times faster. If we have such TAI in say 2035, it could do all the research of the next ten years in only one year. If that happens, we could simply not invest in (whole tissue) cultivated meat R&D for ten years, wait until 2035 and then let the TAI do all that research in one year. Instead of having the results by the end of 2035, we have them by the end of 2036, i.e. 11 instead of 10 years later. That’s only a 10% longer timespan. Hence, this consideration would make the cost-effectiveness of cultivated meat R&D 10 times lower. I’m a bit skeptical that TAI will be able to do all cultivated meat research 10 times faster, because much of that research requires lab experimenting with living tissues in bioreactors, and such research cannot easily be accelerated by computers and robots. But who knows: perhaps TAI can quickly calculate the ideal bioreactor design and the optimal cell types and growth medium to use.
A few years ago, I made a back-of-the-envelope cost-effectiveness calculation for cultivated meat R&D. https://​​stijnbruers.wordpress.com/​​2020/​​08/​​10/​​the-extreme-cost-effectiveness-of-cell-based-meat-rd/​​
That calculation assumed a tractability of 10%, which can be interpreted as: cultivated meat will enter the market sooner or later, and when it does, it will capture 10% of the animal-based meat market, i.e. replace 10% of animal-based meat by cultivated meat. That 10% represents the animal-based meat that will not be substituted by plant-based meat, but will be substituted by cultivated meat. This is in line with the Bryant-Sanctorum study that you mentioned. Even with this low tractability, corresponding to a small complementarity between plant-based and cultivated meat, funding acceleration in cultivated meat R&D remains highly effective. The reason is its neglectedness: in terms of investments and funding, cultivated meat is roughly 10 times more neglected than plant-based meat. If you are right, and plant-based meat will capture more of the animal-based meat market than cultivated meat, it would mean that the current global allocation of R&D funding between plant-based and cultivated meat seems about right. You may believe ten times more in plant-based meat than in cultivated meat innovation, which means you may allocate more (but not all!) funding to plant-based meat.
My major concern about cultivated meat innovation cost-effectiveness, is the longer timeline. The types of cultivated meat that could replace animal-based meat and could not be replaced by plant-based meat, are whole tissue cultivated meat, and those will probably take a few decades before development and becoming competitive with animal-based whole tissue meat. It is likely that within a few decades, we will have transformative artificial intelligence (TAI) that could do research 10 times faster. If we have such TAI in say 2035, it could do all the research of the next ten years in only one year. If that happens, we could simply not invest in (whole tissue) cultivated meat R&D for ten years, wait until 2035 and then let the TAI do all that research in one year. Instead of having the results by the end of 2035, we have them by the end of 2036, i.e. 11 instead of 10 years later. That’s only a 10% longer timespan. Hence, this consideration would make the cost-effectiveness of cultivated meat R&D 10 times lower. I’m a bit skeptical that TAI will be able to do all cultivated meat research 10 times faster, because much of that research requires lab experimenting with living tissues in bioreactors, and such research cannot easily be accelerated by computers and robots. But who knows: perhaps TAI can quickly calculate the ideal bioreactor design and the optimal cell types and growth medium to use.