TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew Predicts 'Real Scientific Breakthrough' From AI Within Three Years

TikTok chief executive Shou Zi Chew said on Monday that artificial intelligence is on the verge of producing major scientific breakthroughs within the next two to three years, arguing that the technology's long-term potential is still underestimated even after several years of breathless headlines about chatbots and generative models.

Chew made the remarks during a fireside discussion titled "Unlocking Human Potential in an AI Era" at the inaugural DBS Asia Future Forward Conference in Singapore, where he joined Shee Tse Koon, DBS's group head of consumer banking and wealth management, on stage.

According to CNBC, which first reported the comments on October 12, Chew said AI could soon accelerate the removal of technological barriers that have historically slowed scientific research.

"In the next two to three years, we're going to have a real scientific breakthrough: physics, biotech," Chew said, framing the prediction around fields where AI is already reshaping how laboratories test hypotheses, iterate experiments, and tackle problems that would have taken human researchers decades to work through unaided.

Chew argued that the industry's focus on conversational AI and content tools has obscured where the most consequential gains may land.

In his view, AI's capacity to compress research timelines — letting labs test more hypotheses in parallel and pursue questions once considered impractical — means discoveries in physics and biotechnology could arrive sooner than most scientists and policymakers expect.

He was careful to add a caveat that has become a running theme among AI executives this year: human judgment, creativity, and authenticity still matter, and increasingly capable AI systems need to operate within clear ethical standards.

The message was consistent with the caution he has struck in previous public appearances — optimistic about the technology's ceiling, wary of deploying it without guardrails.

Chew's two-to-three-year forecast places him alongside a growing list of AI and tech executives willing to put specific timelines on AI-driven scientific progress rather than treating it as a distant hypothetical.

Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei predicted at Davos in 2025 that AI could become "smarter than a Nobel Prize winner" within a similar window, while Google DeepMind chief executive Demis Hassabis has framed a broader scientific "new renaissance" as a ten-to-fifteen-year project.

There is already precedent for AI making Nobel-level contributions to science.

Hassabis and John Jumper shared half of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold's protein-structure prediction work, with David Baker receiving the other half for computational protein design — a landmark the industry still cites as evidence that machine intelligence can produce genuine scientific advances rather than mere automation of existing workflows.

The DBS conference itself underlined how quickly the region is organizing around AI.

The day-long event, held in Singapore on October 12, gathered roughly 700 corporate and wealth clients, investors, and policymakers around the theme of "intentional AI" — deploying the technology with a clear purpose and measurable impact rather than experimentation for its own sake.

Chew shared the agenda with some of the biggest names in global tech and finance, including Singapore Prime Minister Lawrence Wong, Intel chief executive Lip-Bu Tan, Broadcom president and chief executive Hock Tan, and Franklin Templeton chief executive Jenny Johnson.

DBS said it had deployed more than 2,000 AI models across over 430 use cases in 2025, estimating that data analytics, AI, and machine learning generated about SGD 1 billion in economic value that year.

For TikTok's parent ByteDance, the comments also double as a positioning statement: the company has been expanding applied AI tools for advertising and content creation, including its Symphony suite, even as its chief executive talks publicly about the technology's scientific frontier.