Thought Leadership
TikTok owner ByteDance announced in a statement that an intern was dismissed in August for “malicious” manipulation in a model training project. He is alleged to have caused millions of euros worth of damage.
Reports have been circulating on Chinese social media in recent days about a ByteDance intern who allegedly sabotaged the model training process of an important AI project out of dissatisfaction with the allocation of resources.
Viral spread of rumors about losses in the millions
The rumors went viral in tech forums and on platforms such as Weibo. The intern had disrupted the training of an AI model using more than 8,000 H100 GPUs by manipulating the code. The alleged damage is said to amount to tens of millions of dollars.
The story gained additional momentum when an audio recording surfaced on October 18 on an anonymous GitHub page with the name “JusticeFighter110”. In it, the alleged intern, supposedly a student at the prestigious Beihang University and a master’s student at Peking University, appeared to confess to uploading “malicious code” to the ByteDance project. However, the authenticity of this recording was immediately called into question when a separate GitHub repository appeared on the same day calling the recording a fake.
ByteDance denies the extent of the incident
In the midst of the rumors and speculation, ByteDance felt compelled to make an official statement on Saturday. In it, the company admitted that an incident involving an intern had indeed taken place, but firmly rejected the reports circulating about the extent of the sabotage and the resulting losses.
The company confirmed that an intern was dismissed back in August after “maliciously” interfering with a model training project. The intern, who was not named, was part of the commercialization technology team responsible for developing advertising technology. ByteDance said that the intern’s misconduct has been reported to industry bodies and the university concerned for further action.
In the statement published on the company’s own news platform Toutiao, ByteDance emphasized that the incident did not affect the company’s official commercial projects, online operations or the development of large AI language models.
What does ByteDance have to do with AI?
The TikTok owner is currently investing considerable sums in generative AI (GenAI) in order to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The company’s own model called Doubao has become the most used GenAI app in China with 47 million monthly active users (MAU) in September. Its biggest domestic competitor, Baidu’s Ernie Bot (recently renamed Wenxiaoyan), recorded 12 million MAU.
