Shou Chew, CEO of TikTok with Caroline Hyde during a session at the Qatar Economic Forum in Doha, yesterday.
Doha, Qatar: Chief Executive Officer of TikTok Shou Chew has called the current state of artificial intelligence (AI) fascinating, with the potential to improve productivity. The head of the social media giants said AI has significant upside and called for a better understanding of the technology before any ‘guardrails’ are put in place to check it.
“The current progress of the AI is truly very exciting and fascinating, and from everything we have seen so far, it could profoundly improve productivity across many things,” Chew told the Qatar Economic Forum yesterday in Doha.
“It’s a great tool for us to improve our daily lives and work, including creating videos -- TikTok as well, inspiring creativity and bringing joy. You can imagine using some of these creative tools for people to express themselves in a better way than before. As with anything that’s evolving so quickly, we should invest in understanding the risks. I agree that some form of thoughtful, careful regulation is necessary to ensure that we’re building guardrails, but at the same time not killing off the innovation on something that could be so exciting for all of us.” The China-owned TikTok has come under immense scrutiny lately on security due to the short-form video app’s ties to China through its parent company, ByteDance. With over 150 million monthly active users in the United States and over a billion worldwide, Chew said TikTok is not available in Mainland China today, and the Chinese government has never asked TikTok for user data. He added that the company would not provide it even if asked. TikTok on Monday filed a lawsuit against Montana after the US State passed a bill to ban the app from next year.
Chew said the move by Montana is simply unconstitutional, adding the company is confident that it will prevail. According to Chew, TikTok has, over the last two years, built ‘Project Texas’, which ensures that American data is stored on American soil by an American company and overseen by American personnel.
He added TikTok has also started building the same framework for Europe.
“We started Project Clover for Europe a few months ago. The idea is very similar (to Project Texas); we are building our data centres in Ireland, in Norway, localizing data storage in Europe, and building additional data access protocols.
Project Clover, launched in March, is a programme focused on creating a secure enclave for European TikTok user data. TikTok will work with a third-party European security which will audit its data controls and protections, monitor data flows and will make it harder to identify individual users in the data.
