TikTok CEO sees major scientific breakthroughs from AI within three years

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew.

Olivier Douliery | AFP | Getty Images

SINGAPORE — TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew expects artificial intelligence to drive major scientific breakthroughs within the next three years, transforming a broad range of sectors.

"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 on Monday.

Chew's remarks come as ByteDance, TikTok's Chinese parent, expands its artificial intelligence research beyond consumer applications. In April, the company's Seed research team unveiled Protenix-v2, an AI model focused on biomolecular structure prediction and design, with potential applications in drug discovery. 

Chew said rapid advances in AI were opening up possibilities far beyond the technology's current applications, even as questions remain over how to ensure increasingly powerful systems operate within human ethical boundaries.

"If that happens, then you know the question would be: how do you align the models? How do you align the machines to be doing things that are obvious to us as human beings?" he said.

Chew highlighted the accelerating pace of technological development, particularly in scientific research, arguing that the longer-term implications of AI could be far greater than currently anticipated. 

"The trend is very very clear. It's that we are only at the beginning of what artificial intelligence can probably do," he said. "And if you look at where the trend is, [where] the progress is, particularly in areas of science, it's really trending on a very steep curve at this moment in time."

Chew explained that while the technology's immediate impact could be overstated, its longer-term potential remained underappreciated. "I think in the short term we are probably overestimating it, but in the long term we are probably underestimating it," he said.