ByteDance fires interns for project sabotage and denies reports of losses

ByteDance said it terminated an intern in August for “malicious interference” in a model training project after widespread speculation on social media platforms in mainland China. Online reports of the resulting damage were exaggerated and inaccurate, it said.

The misconduct of the unnamed intern – who was part of the commercialization technology team responsible for developing the advertising technology – was reported to industry associations and the relevant university for further action, ByteDance said in a statement posted on Toutiao, its news aggregation platform. on Saturday.

The incident had no impact on official commercial projects, online operations or large-scale artificial intelligence (AI) models, according to the statement. The intern had no experience with the AI ​​Lab and the person's social media profile, and some media reports contained inaccuracies, it said.

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The clarification came after some social media posts claimed that a ByteDance intern sabotaged the model training process with code because he was unhappy with the resource allocation. The posts suggesting the intern disrupted training with a cluster of more than 8,000 H100 GPUs and caused tens of millions of dollars in losses were exaggerated, ByteDance said.

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Earlier this month, ByteDance launched Ola Friend, an open-ear wearable that allows users to interact with the company's chatbot without using their smartphone.

An audio recording posted on October 18 on an anonymous GitHub page called “JusticeFighter110” claimed that the intern, a student at Beihang University and a master's student at Peking University, admitted to uploading “malicious code” to the ByteDance project . On the same day, a separate GitHub repository appeared claiming the audio was fake.