Intern Fired by TikTok Owner for Sabotaging Its AI Model

"The intern involved maliciously interfered with the model training tasks..."

Internal Affairs

ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, fired an intern who apparently screwed with the company's artificial intelligence projects.

As Ars Technica and other outlets report, the social media firm has confirmed that the unnamed commercial team intern was terminated in August after he messed with ByteDance AI models.

"The intern 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 it did not affect the formal commercial projects and online business, nor did it involve other businesses such as ByteDance's large models."

While the company did not say which AI project or projects the intern sabotaged, it could be one of at least 11 it operates — many of which fall under Doubao, its OpenAI rival.

In its statement, the company sought to dispel some "seriously exaggerated" claims about the debacle made elsewhere online — a seeming reference to rumors suggesting that the intern had stolen thousands of graphic processing units (GPUs) and had been jailed for the infraction.

ByteDance added that the offending intern had been reported to the industry organization he belonged to and "handed over" to his school for "handling."

Rumor Mill

While the statement sounds plausible enough, commentators on ByteDance's Toutiao post are, as Ars notes, calling bull.

When one person noted that the original rumors would have been "imprisoned long ago instead of just being fired," for instance, another user who seemed to know what they were talking about suggested the opposite.

"The malicious code was used to deliberately sabotage the training for several months," the other user claimed. "The team's several months of research was in vain, but it did not directly affect 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 totally enough."

Parsing company statements in English and in the West is hard enough, and doing so through Google Translate and from the other side of the world is even more difficult — especially considering China's culture of business secrecy.

It's hard to say definitively if ByteDance is downplaying the severity of its situation — but stranger things certainly have happened, especially in the chaotic AI industry.

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