TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew predicts AI scientific breakthroughs
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew predicted on Monday that artificial intelligence will produce major scientific breakthroughs within two to three years, spanning fields including biotech, physics, chemistry, and materials science."In the next two to three years, we're going to have a real scientific breakthrough: physics, biotech, chemistry, material science, because of AI. It's very, very, very possible," Chew said at the DBS Asia Future Forward Conference in Singapore.Chew argued that AI's longer-term potential is being underestimated even as its short-term impact may be overstated. "I think in the short term we are probably overestimating it, but in the long term we are probably underestimating it," he said, according to CNBC. He described the technology as still in its early stages, particularly in scientific applications, adding that progress is "trending on a very steep curve at this moment in time."He said ByteDance, TikTok's Chinese parent company, is working to connect its AI efforts with the scientific community. "There's an effort to see how we can collaborate with a lot of scientists to make some progress in science as well," Chew said, according to CNBC.Chew also flagged risks accompanying AI's expansion, warning that cybersecurity vulnerabilities are growing as increasingly capable models lower the cost for bad actors to carry out fraud. As one example, he warned that AI agents granted sweeping access could overspend on a user's behalf, because the systems prioritize finishing a job over staying within the boundaries the user had in mind.ByteDance has been building out its AI research. In April, ByteDance's Seed research team published Protenix-v2, a model built for predicting and designing biomolecular structures that could one day aid drug discovery efforts. Last week, the U.S. government, Meta, and Google announced they would jointly contribute to a $1.8 billion effort aimed at building AI models that can forecast cellular behavior, with the goal of speeding up biological research and drug discovery.ByteDance has been financing its AI ambitions at scale. The company secured a $29.6 billion loan from close to three dozen banks in September, with proceeds directed toward AI initiatives outside China, including data centers under development across Southeast Asia. The three-year facility, coordinated by Citigroup and JPMorgan, was structured without collateral — an arrangement lenders described as a reflection of the company's creditworthiness.
