The 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?
No, 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.
and we thought spam calls were bad, now instead of extended warrantys and political surveys, my dog is going to be calling and texting me every 10 minutes asking for treats and belly rubs
Just pulled “Hound of the Far Side” off a shelf last night after not looking at a Larson comic in a long time - reminds me of the one where a car of cows are driving by a field of humans yelling “yakkity yak yak” out the window
I am pretty sure they are exploring AlphaFold, potential growth opportunity. ByteDance has been exploring games, education, online office suites and many more.
Yeah, this isn't really that different than quant hedge funds hiring theoretical physics PhDs. It's not like you're actually going to be doing Yang Mills field equations to trade some stocks. They just need a guy to run some linear regressions, and can afford to find someone really really overqualified so they don't screw up.
Not sure if these people are overqualified as much as the fact that people who check the box on paper are generally unqualified. Generally good people can only really do math up to a few years below the highest level that they learned in school. If you actually need someone to do basic linear algebra you probably want somehow who took classes that went well beyond the freshman/sophomore level that everyone has.
Well if you have a mathematics undergraduate degree you would have taken classes "that went well beyond the freshman/sophomore level that everyone has."
I don't see why it's necessary to have a potentially unrelated PHD to do basic linear algebra.
I'd suspect someone who was self-taught in mathematics wouldn't have a disconnect between apparent and actual ability either; teaching math to people who primarily need it to pass an exam is a very different process from learning the same material out of personal interest.
All 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..
Probably 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
Is 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!
> Nuclear weapons have killed about ~200k people in all of history.
So far. Present performance is not indicative of future returns. All it will take is one nut job (who could still be Putin depending on how this turns out) escalating to even a "regional" nuclear war to add a zero or two to that number, and it could happen very quickly.
Advertising today is figuring out the preferences and behavioral patterns of different social groups. It's not based on economics, it's mostly stats and probability theory.
But the knowledge we gain is only about triggering the bad paths of human brain, like addiction, greed, FOMO, etc. And who is "we" anyway, this stuff isn't public.
No, because literally every business that exists wants to advertise. (And also organizations that aren't businesses, like NGO's and government agencies and non-profits.)
TikTok will make $11B in ad revenue this year. It is their business model. This is twice as large as Twitter's business, and a third of Instagram or YouTube.
There 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.
They would have to spend a LOT more to go bell labs. Until now they spend way too little to achieve anything. And for companies like Google have real managers for those groups instead of people only good at optimizing metrics.
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?
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.
TikTok, 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?
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.
Porn 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.
It is because of the massive psychological engineering that takes place behind the scenes. Authors or book publishing companies do not hire teams of psychologists to engineer and A/B test their products to try to get you locked into a dopamine reward cycle. The same kind of approaches that casinos do to hook you in and keep you addicted are now standard in these mobile apps.
Maybe 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.
Tiktok/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.
In 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.
This 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?
There 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.
I know people are exploring this front currently. Basically you could use results from DFT+U to train the potential; but I am also told that strongly correlation can now be better described by SCAN functionals better than LDA+U etc so it would be even easier then.
I would guess they are planning to offer ML infrastructure as a service type stuff for chem simulation to various firms - would make sense they would need a few people in house to help build the systems and act as the "sales engineers" types who can interface with the chemistry super nerds they are trying to sell to.
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.
Experimenting 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.
ByteDance, 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.
Users 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.
They 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.
Most 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.
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.
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.
Yeah, 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
I 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.
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.
Chinese 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.
If the party wanted to tap into (or monopolize) the top emerging computationalists from the world, beyond the limit of Chinese nationals, and you were one of them approaching graduation, would you be willing to or allowed to be recruited directly into party service with a paycheck coming directly from the party?
Or more likely to merely work remotely as an employee of a captive company?
Looks like a minimum of 7 staggered projects where each one may already have a defined objective which needs to remain obscure to the actual participants under this program.
>Our goal is to create breakthroughs in natural science with new methodology
Directly straightforward, everybody wants this. It's completely true and challenging enough that the recruits will need to be immersed in this to the max, given anything they want in pursuit of this objective, with no stone unturned.
>and help the world.
Help the world do what?
None of these recruits will have any influence as to "what" turns out to be, and will be expected to never concern themseleves with this other side of the equation. Those that conform can be rewarded over the long term better than any non-monopoly can compare to, increasing the likelihood of having their challenging scientific objectives being eventually met.
Naievete looks so important that upcoming graduates appear to have precedece over established professionals. Rather than the proven performance that businesses can count on, there could instead be emphasis on freshly proven potential, willing to be indoctrinated into a "company" culture that is "humble, intelligent, compassionate and creative" on the party's own (carefully crafted) terms so any alternative cultural features can be nipped in the bud.
This is intended to be someone's first job [0] and they definitely want to see if they can find the kind of people who would have ordinarily worked for Bell Labs if it was still a monopoly.
As always you've got to carefully choose what kind of monopolies and their labs you want to promote, or even support at all.
If the monopolistic salvos are large enough, it might even be possible to fully brain-drain the competition while exponentially increasing their own chances of complete domination.
[0] Well actually almost every one of them's first job.
It works the same way in capitalist countries - except it’s enforced with money and patriotism instead of democratically introduced, officially existing rules.
They are the same in every practical sense, in particular in their end results.
The differences you mention are an implementation detail - in some countries you have the rules written down as law, in others you got shady three letter agencies, kangaroo "FISA courts", and In-Q-Tel.
The end results are not the same. There are many observable differences between doing business in China and in the US or other western market democracies. For instance, executive action is regularly challenged in the US, and successfully so.
Which, translated to western terms, is like guidance of the Department of Justice.
>politicians from two competing parties
Here the term “party” means something completely different from above. If you imagine the political system as layers, China places boundaries between those layers differently from the West, and if you continue to use the terms for those layers (“party”) without realizing this, you’ll arrive at silly conclusions.
Please stop the attitude of pandering to low-IQ redditors when proposing plausible theories with self-deprecation and incorrect use of the word "conspiracy"
