TikTok’s parent company ByteDance is suing a former intern for allegedly sabotaging an AI training project. According to the South China Morning Post, ByteDance is seeking 8 million yuan (about $1.1 million) in damages and a public apology from former intern Tian Keyu. The lawsuit has already been accepted by Beijing’s Haidian District Court and includes allegations that Tian manipulated code related to the AI training project. ByteDance also owns the AI chatbot Doubao, the company’s answer to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
According to a ByteDance statement, Tian was fired in August for “maliciously interfering with model training operations.” In the same statement, ByteDance denied rumours that the rigging affected 8,000 GPU cards and cost the company tens of millions of dollars, saying those claims were “highly exaggerated.” The company also said that while Tian claimed to be part of its AI research lab, he was part of a separate commercial technology team.
ByteDance has been busy with AI-focused projects. It has introduced several features for TikTok, including AI-generated digital avatars and AI tools for advertising. It also reportedly has a powerful web crawler called Bytespider that reads content on the internet for LLM training.
