This creamy vegan cheese was made with AI

"Traditional ingredient discovery can take years and tens of millions of dollars, and what results are ingredients only incrementally better than the previous generation," says Shiru CEO Jasmin Hume, who wrote her PhD thesis on protein engineering. "[Now] we can go from scratch, meaning what nature has to offer; pick out the proteins that will function best; and prototype and test them in about three months." Not everyone in the industry is bullish about AI-assisted ingredient discovery. Jonathan McIntyre, a food consultant who formerly headed R&D teams in both beverages and snacks at Pepsi, thinks the technology is "significantly" overhyped as a tool for his field. "AI is only as good as the data you feed it," he says.