After Tencent, Huawei, and Baidu, TikTok’s parent company ByteDance is also extending its AI support into the pharmaceutical world

ByteDance is a famous Chinese conglomerate that has been in the news for a long time because of the feud over its short-form video-sharing app TikTok with the US administration. The company has been accused by Donald Trump’s administration of the intrusive data collection. Now, amidst all that chaos and after a long trail of threats, ultimatums, and bans, it seems that nothing could lower ByteDance’s morale. Just recently, the company has listed job postings for five positions in the field of Artificial Intelligence Drug Discovery. The company is recruiting candidates from Mountain View, Beijing, and Shanghai.

As per the company’s recruitment page, ByteDance is looking to expand its AI team and is efficiently searching for capable candidates who can help the company with cutting-edge research in the field of drug discovery and manufacturing, all powered by Artificial Intelligence algorithms.

There are five postings currently, requiring the candidates to have a Ph.D. degree in computer sciences, computational biology, computational chemistry, mathematics, and some other relevant subjects. Their jobs would entail drug development, design, identification, stimulation, and all the other aspects related to drug manufacture and discovery.

ByteDance created its AI labs back in 2016, but they were initially meant to provide AI-related content services like the ones used in Douyin, the Chinese alternative of TikTok. However, now, the company has decided to expand its AI technology and enter the world of pharmaceuticals with the help of AI-powered algorithms and techniques.

ByeDance AI Lab is already involved with many research fields, and it will be an interesting addition now with drug research and development.

Another Chinese company, Tencent has also been actively engaging with AI-powered drug discovery and findings since August 2019 under its AI Lab.

In September 2020, Reuters reported that Baidu has plans to raise around $2billion for a biotechnological company set up that focuses on AI-powered drug discovery and diagnostics.

Not only these companies, but Huawei also expanded its cloud computing technology for drug discovery, medical imaging, and some other research fields in the pharmaceutical and medical industry.

Now, ByteDance also joins these companies and it is actually quite commendable. The world is changing drastically, and new diseases are coming up every little while. Powerful companies should come together and expand research, discovery, and development of new and unique drugs to overcome all these health obstacles.


Photo: VCG via Getty Images

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