Shou Zi Chew: AI will rewrite science in three years — ByteDance's bets
Speaking at DBS Bank's first Asia Future Forward Forum in Singapore on 12 October, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew said real scientific breakthroughs in physics, biotechnology, chemistry and materials science will arrive within two to three years thanks to AI, while arguing that humans must stay involved in high-stakes work. The article lays out ByteDance's related moves: in June 2026 it spun out its five-year-old AI-for-Science drug discovery team as Anew Labs, which raised $290 million at a $1.5 billion post-money valuation while ByteDance kept a 56% stake; and its Seed team released Protenix-v2 in April 2026 under Apache 2.0 with open code and weights, which the article says matches or exceeds DeepMind's AlphaFold 3 on several core benchmarks and beats the previous generation's 1,000-seed antibody-antigen results with just five seeds. It also notes ByteDance's September 2026 $29.6 billion three-year bank loan for AI projects outside China, and argues AI4S is now bottlenecked on validation — citing Insilico Medicine's Rentosertib, where AI cut discovery to 18 months but Phase III data are not expected until 2029.
Chew's public forecast, together with ByteDance's Anew Labs spin-out, open-sourced Protenix-v2 and large bank loan, illustrates the in-house-pipeline approach big tech is taking to AI for Science.