ByteDance Dismisses Intern for Project Sabotage, Refutes Claims of Exaggerated Losses

ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok, has fired an intern for deliberately disrupting a model training project in August. The company has also dismissed any claims regarding financial losses.

ByteDance announced that it had dismissed an intern in August for "deliberately disrupting" a model training project, amid widespread rumors on Chinese social networks. The company also stated that online reports detailing the subsequent harm were overstated and incorrect.

The inappropriate behaviour of an unidentified intern, who was a member of the team in charge of developing advertising technology, has been reported to industry groups and the associated university for additional measures, according to a statement released by ByteDance on Toutiao, its news gathering platform, on Saturday.

The incident had no impact on the company's formal business ventures, digital activities, or its extensive language AI models, as per the announcement. The intern was not familiar with the AI Lab, and there were discrepancies in the individual's social media presence and several media stories, the statement further clarified.

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ByteDance issued a statement following rumors on social media that an intern at the company had tampered with the model training process due to discontent about resource distribution. These rumors indicated that the intern had interfered with a training that used over 8,000 H100 GPUs, leading to losses in the range of tens of millions of dollars. ByteDance, however, dismissed these claims as being exaggerated.

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Earlier in the month, ByteDance introduced Ola Friend, an open-ear device that enables users to communicate with the company's chatbot, bypassing the need for smartphones.

An audio file was uploaded to a nameless GitHub page named "JusticeFighter110" on October 18 alleging that an intern, who is an undergraduate at Beihang University and a master's student at Peking University, admitted to inserting "malicious code" into a ByteDance project. On the same date, another GitHub repository emerged, asserting that the audio was fabricated.