Intern fired by TikTok owner for sabotaging his AI model

Home Affairs

ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, has fired an intern who apparently tampered with the company’s artificial intelligence projects.

If Ars Technica and other media reports that the social media company has confirmed that the unnamed commercial team intern was fired in August after tampering with ByteDance AI models.

“The trainee involved maliciously interfered with the model training tasks of the commercial technology team’s research project,” the company said in a statement on its content platform Toutiao, “but this did not affect the formal commercial projects and online business, nor was there any other companies such as the big models of ByteDance.”

While the company hasn’t said which AI project or projects the intern sabotaged, it could be one of 11 projects it operates — many of which fall under Doubao, its OpenAI rival.

In its statement, the company attempted to refute a number of “seriously exaggerated” claims about the debacle made elsewhere online – an apparent reference to rumors suggesting the intern stole thousands of graphics processing units (GPUs) and was jailed for the offense had been sitting.

ByteDance added that the offending trainee had been reported to the industry association he belonged to and “transferred” to his school for “treatment.”

Rumor mill

While the explanation sounds plausible enough, commenters on ByteDance’s Toutiao post are Ars notes, calling bull.

For example, when someone commented that the original rumors “would have been put in jail a long time ago instead of just fired,” another user who seemed to know what he was talking about suggested the opposite.

“The malicious code was used to deliberately sabotage training for months,” the other user claimed. “The team’s months-long investigation was in vain, but it had no direct impact on the product line.”

“It’s just a matter of whether the company wants to pursue it or not,” they continued. “Based on what (he) did, it’s completely enough.”

Parsing corporate statements in English and in the West is difficult enough, and doing so via Google Translate and from the other side of the world is even more difficult – especially given China’s culture of business secrecy.

It’s hard to say for sure whether ByteDance is downplaying the severity of the situation – but stranger things have certainly happened, especially in the chaotic AI industry.

More about Chinese AI: Report: Thanks to AI, China’s data centers will drink more water than all of South Korea by 2030