SINGAPORE — TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew expects artificial intelligence to lead to major scientific breakthroughs over the next three years, transforming a wide range of sectors.
“In the next two to three years, we are going to see a real scientific breakthrough: physics, biotechnology, chemistry, materials science, thanks to AI. It is 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 company, expands its artificial intelligence research beyond consumer applications. In April, the company’s Seed research team unveiled Protenix-v2, an AI model focused on the prediction and design of biomolecular structures, with potential applications in drug discovery.
Chew said rapid advances in AI are opening up possibilities far beyond the technology’s current applications, although questions remain about how to ensure increasingly powerful systems operate within human ethical boundaries.
“If that happens, then you know the question would be: How do we align the models? How do we align the machines to do things that are obvious to us as human beings?” he said.
Chew highlighted the accelerating pace of technological development, particularly in scientific research, saying the long-term implications of AI could be far greater than currently expected.
“The trend is very, very clear. We’re 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, especially in the scientific areas, the curve is really, really steep right now.”
Chew explained that while the technology’s immediate impact may be overestimated, its long-term potential remains underestimated. “I think in the short term we probably overestimate it, but in the long term we probably underestimate it,” he said.
His optimism comes at a time when tech giants are investing billions of dollars in AI-powered scientific research. Last week, the US government, Meta and Google announced their participation in a $1.8 billion initiative to develop AI models that can predict cell behavior, with the aim of accelerating biological research and drug discovery.
TikTok’s parent company ByteDance is also developing its own AI models and exploring opportunities to collaborate with scientists in research.
“There is an effort to see how we can collaborate with a large number of scientists to also make scientific advances,” Chew added. “We’ve done some work in this area, and it’s very exciting.”
He described scientific discovery as one of the most promising applications of AI, even as the technology increasingly reshapes TikTok’s operations, from content creation and recommendations to search and moderation.
Chew warned that AI’s growing capabilities would require stronger safeguards, particularly as autonomous systems become more widely adopted.
“I think the cybersecurity risks are quite significant,” he said, warning that users may grant broad permissions to AI agents without fully understanding the potential consequences.
He highlighted the risks of allowing AI agents to make purchases autonomously, saying the systems could end up buying more than users anticipated in their eagerness to complete a task.
Chew also highlighted the growing cybersecurity challenges facing businesses as increasingly sophisticated AI models make fraudulent activity much less costly for malicious actors.
“So you need the right tools to defend against the rapidly declining costs of creating problems for platforms like ours, security problems for us,” he stressed.
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