ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, terminates an Intern for sabotaging their AI training models. The company denies the claim that the intern impacted 8000 GPU, saying ‘seriously exaggerated’.
The parent company of TikTok, ByteDance has reportedly terminated an intern over disrupting the progress of their AI project model. The company revealed that the intern was terminated back in August for maliciously sabotaging the AI training models. However, denies the claim that the act cost them over 10 million dollars.
“An intern in the commercial technology team had committed serious disciplinary violations and the intern has been terminated. The intern involved maliciously interfered with the model training tasks of the commercial technology team’s research project, but it didn’t affect the formal commercial projects and online business, nor did it affect other businesses such as ByteDance’s large AI models. The intern had no experience with the AI lab and his social media profile and reports contain some inaccuracies”, says ByteDance in a post on Toutia (translation), a Chinese social news platform.
The clarification came after a social media post entitled Intern Termination as an impact of injecting malicious code and catering parameters to a group of Graphical Processing Unit computers trying to implant a virus within the company’s AI training system.
While some GitHub records and LinkedIn profiles completely dispute the statements of ByteDance. A voice record from the GitHub page says the intern was an undergraduate from Beihang University and a master’s student at Peking University and admitted to inserting malicious code into ByteDance’s AI project, however, no significant proof to validate. A voice note came later claiming the earlier video was fake. The post can be true and a chance of someone intentionally trying to defame the ByteDance can also not be ignored.
Though ByteDance has a stronghold in the video streaming platform TikTok, the path to AI primacy was not as easy as it seems. However, with continuous efforts and diligence, ByteDance has been gaining advancements in generative AI and is competing to develop AI tools that could compete with leading AI platforms.
At the beginning of 2024, ByteDance’s Doubaou chatbot beat Baidu’s Ernie (recently rebranded as Wenxiaoyan) in a competition to become the best chatbot in China. It owns 47 million monthly active users, as of reports of September from an authorized tracker. Whereas its competitors, Baidu’s Ernie Bot and Moon Shoot AI’s Kimi have 12 million and 7 million active users respectively.
Doubao integrates with ByteDance’s new wireless earbud ‘Ola Friend’, offering an AI interaction without the requirement of a smartphone at the beginning of October. The product is only available in China at a price of $170.
ByteDance, considered a threat to US safety policy, plans to launch its own AI chips with Huawei to eliminate the dependence on high-cost Nvidia chips and to set itself free from US regulatory laws.
The incident of termination has set fire to social media platforms, and to calm public concerns, ByteDance assured the people that their official commercial products were not affected. The company also added that the intern was not just terminated, but also the issue was informed to the university and the relevant industry association indicating the seriousness of the act and allowing them to take the required actions.
The company was on its way to expanding its AI initiatives when the sudden backstab from the incident occurred. However, ByteDance continues to push its AI race forward using products like Dubao.
The act portrays the growing significance of AI in the tech industry, the challenges companies face to overcome these issues, and also how such incidents affect the reputation and future projects of the company.
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