"Our brightest minds are making people click ads" ...
TikTok has an open computational chemistry position
31–40 of 148 posts
Re: TikTok has an open computational chemistry position
#32What could that possibly be for?
This could be used to verify the quality of TikTok's data scientists.
They cannot verify them directly because they cannot publish their algorithms and data. So let them do science and figure out who knows his algorithms.
*edit: actually:
>Optimize and speed up classical molecular dynamics and quantum chemistry algorithms with artificial intelligence and high-throughput computational methods.
They are building an algorithm library
Re: TikTok has an open computational chemistry position
#33In the description: Team Introduction Scientific Computing team has been focusing on tackling challenges in natural sciences including biology, physics, and materials, with computational tools such as Machine Learning, Computational Chemistry, High-throughput Computation. Our goal is to create breakthroughs in natural science with new methodology and help the world. Responsibilities • Follow the latest progress in co…
This sounds like an entirely in silico research effort. It's also kind of weird, there's apparently no public history of ByteDance or Tiktok doing any kind of work like this. The closet thing is the "ByteDance AI Lab" but that seems to be recommendation-algorithm-focused, nothing about computational chemistry.
It looks like some of their people have recently left for academia, so maybe it's just trying to get people into their AI lab with the necessary skills? Honestly doesn't seem like a very promising role for someone primarily interested in chem/bio applications, though.
Re: TikTok has an open computational chemistry position
#34Maybe they are looking into what problems they can solve with side door access to 750 million phones worth of compute power.
Re: TikTok has an open computational chemistry position
#35Re: TikTok has an open computational chemistry position
#36TikTok, Facebook and Twitter are pharmaceutical companies. They peddle quick dopamine hits. We're all junkies that can't/won't pay for the hits so they wrap up the drugs they give us in ad-paper.
This analogy is cringe because it's overstretched. Argument: For example, are books considered pharmaceutical products (typically not quick--that would be like "delayed release" medicine) just because you get pleasure from reading them?
Re: TikTok has an open computational chemistry position
#37People seem to forget that TikTok was originally a pharmaceutical startup…
Ok. But why don't they operate under a different name?
I’ve heard they received some kind of government healthcare grant early on, which requires them to keep providing services under the TikTok name for at least 15 years.
Re: TikTok has an open computational chemistry position
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let’s hope so. Not enough of this in the world: “We choose to do these things not because they are easy but because they are hard” But I’d be happy with a little Bell Labs at a few more companies
I wonder if the Google Graveyard is full of things that proved to be too hard?
Makani is a fantastic documentary.
Re: TikTok has an open computational chemistry position
#39What could that possibly be for?
Just imagining a couple of possibilities…
It could be for helping them moderate vaccine or climate misinformation, e.g., https://www.tiktok.com/safety/en/covid-19/
It could be part of establishing or expanding their research division mainly devoted to getting smart people inside the company, having publications and patents in their portfolio, or inventing algorithms that scale better with big data. There are open quantum computing and scientific computing jobs too.
Re: TikTok has an open computational chemistry position
#40What could that possibly be for?
You can think of it the way Finance people hire Astronomers & other physicists.
Physics may have nothing to do with financial markets but the math tools and research skills physicists have are useful in finance.
The same goes for Computational chemistry and analysing of data for a video streaming site