12 ms·
TikTok has an open computational chemistry position
- JohnJamesRambo 4y agoI’m thoroughly confused. I’ve worked with many computational chemists and nothing they did matches anything TikTok is into that I’m aware of.
- goldenchrome 4y agoWhat could that possibly be for?
- tclancy 4y agoDating site spinoff.
- junon 4y agoAt face value this seems like a silly suggestion. But actually, I could totally see TikTok doing this.
- DoktorDelta 4y agoMaybe they're looking for someone who can leverage computational neurochemistry to make the app more addictive?
- sh4rks 4y agoThat would rank pretty far up in the "unethical jobs" list
- pcmill 4y agoTracking viral videos?
- tkk23 4y agoThis 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
- dahart 4y agoJust 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/ 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.
- max_ 4y agoYou 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
- ProjectArcturis 4y agoIs this like when Google started throwing off massive amounts of money, and Larry and Sergei were like, "I dunno, let's solve aging"?
- melling 4y agoLet’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
- bismuthcrystal 4y agoMore like: “We choose to do these things not because they are easy but because they are profitable”
- marcosdumay 4y agoHum... That's clearly not the case. That's why there isn't a lot of it around.
- spiffytech 4y agoThere are a lot of things that would be profitable, that are held back by either belief that they can't be done or by failure of imagination on their ramifications. Or because people profit from the status quo remaining unchanged. Non-scientific example: I just read The Box, a history of container shipping. It's remarkable how many transportation incumbents tried to put the kibosh on containerization because they believed it was either not practical or not profitable. In the end containerization hurt many existing power structures, but it reinvented global commerce and opened unfathomable financial doors for the world as a whole, creating financial empires that were impossible before.
- hotpotamus 4y agoI wonder if the Google Graveyard is full of things that proved to be too hard?
- beshur 4y ago(Happy Jesse Pinkman noises)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- case0x00 4y ago[techcrunch article from 2020](https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/23/bytedance-ai-drug/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/23/bytedance-ai-drug/). I guess its not actually tiktok, but bytedance
- helsinkiandrew 4y agoSo does Facebook and Google - once you get large enough you can create departments that are much less production/profit focussed and more long term.
- baybal2 4y ago
- bovermyer 4y agoI wonder if TikTok is investigating alternative display methods beyond just screens. Computational chemistry might be useful for figuring out a way to rearrange molecular structure as a display method.
- kuu 4y agoIn 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 computational science such as material and biology. • Solve real-world problems in material and biology, with computational approaches such as molecular dynamics, quantum chemistry, and machine learning. • Optimize and speed up classical molecular dynamics and quantum chemistry algorithms with artificial intelligence and high-throughput computational methods. --- Maybe they do some research related with biology and they need a Computational Chemistry expert?
- photochemsyn 4y agoThis 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.
- whoisjuan 4y agoIf you buy the theory that Bytedance is a covert operation by the Chinese government, then this fits the narrative. Use the TikTok brand to attract top global talent and perform research in areas of general interest for government agencies. They only need to build a backdoor for Chinese officials to access the research data. Sounds far fetched but I believe this is well within the realm of possibilities.
- causi 4y agoat some levels a covert operation by the Chinese government It isn't covert. They only need to build a backdoor for Chinese officials to access the research data. If it's located in China the Chinese government can access it, period. It's not secret or a conspiracy; it's how business is done.
- freewinz 4y agoPlease stop the attitude of pandering to low-IQ redditors when proposing plausible theories with self-deprecation and incorrect use of the word "conspiracy"
- whoisjuan 4y agoThis is not pandering. I don’t have any information to categorically claim any of this, so why would I say it in any other way? I’m self-deprecating because I’m on the fence on whether or not this is real or just some fictional plot I want to believe. Chill, alright?
- kube-system 4y agoChinese law requires companies to make provisions for representing the interests of the CCP within companies of significant size. This isn’t a conspiracy, it’s routine business law. There is no need for the CCP to conspire to control businesses. They have ultimate control of business law. The idea that companies and governments are independent things is a pretty capitalist perspective. There’s a wide range of other perspectives on this issue.
- 4y ago
- cavanasm 4y agoThe title of the job opening says computational chemistry, but the details indicate they're looking for someone with credentials in one of a few different computation / simulation specialized fields. If I had to guess, it seems possible they think those types of simulation design skills may be useful for simulating user social behavior somehow?
- jollyllama 4y agoModeling user brain chemistry? Ominous.
- kirykl 4y agoself-aware General AI who's existence is entirely made of simulated eons of watching tiktoks
- throw827474737 4y agoAll much too complicated, they are just interested in someone coming up with more "what happens if you put mentos into coke"-type reactions for their content creator's inspiration..
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- c7b 4y agoNo, it's really about material science and biology, just read further in the ad: Responsibilities • Follow the latest progress in computational science such as material and biology. • Solve real-world problems in material and biology, with computational approaches such as molecular dynamics, quantum chemistry, and machine learning. • Optimize and speed up classical molecular dynamics and quantum chemistry algorithms with artificial intelligence and high-throughput computational methods.
- ackbar03 4y agoThat will be cool if their really looking to expand into something useful like biochemistry r&d, similar to Google with deepmind.
- aaaaaaaaaaab 4y agoPeople seem to forget that TikTok was originally a pharmaceutical startup…
- amelius 4y agoOk. But why don't they operate under a different name?
- aaaaaaaaaaab 4y agoI’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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- intrasight 4y agoThey hired a friend who's a neuroscientist who specializes in reading minds. At least I know what they're up to.
- LeonTheremin 4y agoUsers have been noticing Google's ads are based on thoughts they had and without any chance of correlation to whatever Google's AI could infer from previous interaction. Same for Twitter, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, TikTok. Big Tech's algorithms have long been tapping into illegal surveillance of an unprecedented kind - besides the cliques of insiders who misuse this for stalking and harassment of children, human rights defenders, activists, minorities and everyone else. Don't expect them to be honest about their surveillance.
- addcn 4y agoTikTok, 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.
- tenebrisalietum 4y agoThis 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?
- sfpotter 4y agoSaying things are cringe is the cringest thing of all.
- Fendii 4y agoIf you follow the original comment, yes. I think you need a better discussion tool here.
- drooby 4y agoNot that cringe to me. Tiktok and the like are highly addictive for some people and the dopamine kicks are real and unhealthy. Reading books does not give the same release of dopamine as TikTok/Instagram.. hence why most people don’t read for 2 hours a day but many people easily spend that much time on insta/tik. Modulating behavior can cause physical withdrawals.. you don’t need a pill. I.e lovers, gambling addicts, porn addicted.
- tenebrisalietum 4y agoShould we require prescriptions for porn magazines then?
- drooby 4y agoPorn was perhaps a bad example because I don’t think evidence suggests conclusively that it is addictive. But take gambling.. gambling is considered addictive and its disorder classified in the DSM-5. (Gambling is probably also most like TikTok/Instagram in terms of activating reward seeking and pleasure in the brain). In the US we do heavily regulate gambling and some legislations have required warning labels for the risks involved with gambling. So no, if would not be unreasonable to me if we as a society discussed potentially regulating social media in some way.. be it as non-invasive as warning messaging.
- tsjackson 4y agoI'm really curious about this. Hypothesis 1) Tik Tok believes AI/machine learning algorithms themselves are converging across fields, and the company is finding that its internal AI innovations can be applied to biology and materials sciences algos and, possibly, vice versa. We'll call this one the "data are data" hypothesis. Hypothesis 2) Tik Tok has decided that it's an AI company, not a content platform company. This is subtly different, as the locus of intersection between social media and materials sciences is in the company's human capital, not the algorithms used. Call this the "Data Scientists are Data Scientists" hypothesis. Hypothesis 3) Tik Tok, as an avatar of the CCP, is deliberately adding fuel to the narrative that its a national security threat, thus baiting Biden to shut it down, which would be hugely unpopular with one of his critical voting blocks. Call this the "Troll Biden" hypothesis. All of these hypotheses seem really important from a geopolitical perspective. If social media companies become our primary engines of applied sciences, that would be a pretty huge shift. If the CCP is using Tik Tok to use cultural popularity to play chicken in the trade war with the US government, that's a pretty major development as well. Any other ideas? Am I missing something obvious?
- powerapple 4y agoByteDance, as a company, it actively looking to expand to new growth area. The original product was a news reader, then TikTok, also other video platform, it also publishes games, acquired a VR headset company Pico, developed the most popular Google Works clone. I think it is looking into something similar to AlphaFold, it is a big market. It is the never end mission of Internet companies with lots of money, where is next growth.
- kuramitropolis 4y agoExperimenting on people. It's the new sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll revolution, delivered straight to your optic nerve, so get with it. They already got the monitoring and analytics in place - ain't no regulator got sufficient resolution to stop them from figuring out how to make that dopamine hit just right.
- amelius 4y ago"Our brightest minds are making people click ads" ...
- api 4y agoA few generations ago many of our brightest minds were building doomsday weapons to incinerate all life on Earth, so maybe this is progress.
- SQueeeeeL 4y agoProbably not, if you shoot a man, there's a perpetrator and an end. If you brainwash a man, forever his actions will no longer be fully his own. Plus most people view violence as something undesirable (see Vietnam war protests), but advertising still has many hawks who will never stop singing it's praises while all public spaces are consumed by corporate branding until we have no where uninfected
- appletrotter 4y ago> if you shoot a man, there's a perpetrator and an end I don’t know about this assertion. It does not ring true to real life for me.
- thih9 4y agoI'd say the state of "forever his actions will no longer be fully his own" is easier to reach with doomsday weapons than with ads.
- dryd 4y agoIs the claim here that working in the advertising industry is worse than working on “doomsday devices to incinerate all life on Earth”? What a hot take!
- goatcode 4y agoIs it? Would you rather be dead or a zombie?
- Sommer 4y agoMaybe they are looking into what problems they can solve with side door access to 750 million phones worth of compute power.
- czl_my 4y agoIt's probably a cross-hire for one of their Parent company's biotech arm. https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/23/bytedance-ai-drug/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/23/bytedance-ai-drug/
- whymauri 4y agoMost likely answer, I think.
- eunos 4y agoBytedance wanted to enter Biotech for a while https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/23/bytedance-ai-drug/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/23/bytedance-ai-drug/
- chazeon 4y agoTiktok/bytedance already have large ML infrastructure in place (GPU clusters), and since quantum chemistry simulation is moving towards ML based simulation, they have an edge there. Open source ML simulation software such as DeePMD-kit is already seeing contributions from Tiktok employees.
- chazeon 4y agoIn case HN readers doesn’t know, ML based MD scales O(N) and traditional DFT based simulation O(N^3) where N is number of atoms. From first hand experience: what used take weeks with traditional DFT MD on CPUs are only taking few minutes with GPUs right now if you have trained a good ML potential. They achieved near DFT accuracy.
- mirker 4y agoThis type of complexity argument is also used in graphics rendering as far as I am aware. In graphics, it just has to look ok. Is there any concern for bounded error in MD?
- chazeon 4y agoWell in MD you always have to compare to experimental measurements from a macroscopic level. And you have to repeat DFT results as far as you can do DFT on it.
- 11101010001100 4y agoBut the dynamics are still classical right? You are just using a highly accurate interatomic potential.
- chazeon 4y agoThere is path-integral MD with imaginary time you can use to address quantum effects such as tunneling when you have protons in the system. But yeah, basically are still doing ionic dynamics and ignoring the electrons. The electronic effect needs to be "baked" into the ML potential when you are training the potential with DFT data.
- varelse 4y ago
- civilized 4y agoI don't like 'em putting chemicals in the water that turn the freakin' frogs gay.
- nickpinkston 4y agoInterviewer: "We see you've extensively modeled molecules dancing, so we thought you could molecularly model models dancing. Does that make sense?"
- wdutch 4y agoI wonder if they would leverage users devices for computations, similar to folding@home[0] 0: https://foldingathome.org/?lng=en-US https://foldingathome.org/?lng=en-US
- muaytimbo 4y agoI suspect they are interested in doing graph ML, computation chemists are good at that.
- Apocryphon 4y agoThey’ve noticed the large segment of videos about mental illness and decided to go into the pharma business.
- jonathankoren 4y agoEither they’re keyword stuffing for gullible science people to get them to click ads or build out ETL pipelines, or they’re drunk on money.
- omoikane 4y agoMaybe they already have a list of individuals that they want to hire, and they are trying to write the job requisition to fit those individuals' backgrounds.
- abdullahkhalids 4y agoThey also have a internship for Quantum Research [1] > Our team studies the electronic structure and other quantum chemistry topics using machine-learning-based ab initio methods as well as quantum computing technology. We aim at applications intractable for classical methods and expect to achieve breakthroughs in areas like chemistry and materials. [1] https://careers.tiktok.com/position/7150350193095002382/detail https://careers.tiktok.com/position/7150350193095002382/deta...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- raydiatian 4y agoNever click links from TikTok.
- kqr 4y agoMost of these "computational X" people do one thing really well: solve partial differential equations. Incidentally, PDEs are also a useful modeling tool for all sorts of simulation and optimisation. It's why you see physicists in finance, for example.
- type0 4y agoYeah, who wouldn't want an tiktok implant. It is going to be called TickTok be the size of a tick and will give you the Lyme disease symptoms so you can create funny clumsy videos more easily