TikTok owner fires interns for allegedly sabotaging AI project | TikTok

The owner of TikTok has fired an intern for allegedly sabotaging an internal artificial intelligence project.

ByteDance said it fired the person in August after he “maliciously” interfered with the training of artificial intelligence (AI) models used in a research project.

Thanks to the video-sharing app TikTok and its Chinese counterpart Douyin, which are among the world's most popular mobile apps, ByteDance has become one of the world's most important social media companies.

Like other big players in the technology sector, ByteDance has also embarked on a journey towards generative AI. Its Doubao chatbot replaced Baidu's Ernie in the race to create a Chinese rival to OpenAI's ChatGPT earlier this year.

ByteDance has also released wireless earbuds that are integrated with Doubao, allowing users to interact with the chatbot directly without a mobile phone.

The company commented on the intern's firing after rumors spread widely on Chinese social media over the weekend.

According to a translation, ByteDance said in a statement posted on its news aggregator service Toutiao that an intern in its commercial technology team had been fired for serious disciplinary violations.

It added that its official commercial products and its large language models, the technology underlying generative AI, were not affected.

The company said reports and rumors on social media contained exaggerations, including about the extent of the disruption. ByteDance said this included rumors that up to 8,000 graphics processing units, the chips used to train AI models, were affected and that losses ran into tens of millions of dollars.

ByteDance said it informed the intern's university and industry associations about his behavior.

This comes amid scrutiny from tech companies around the world over the safety of generative AI models and the impact of social media.

ByteDance is also under particular scrutiny in the USA, where it is fighting an impending federal ban. The company has until January 19 to sell or close its stake in TikTok to an approved buyer. The US government claims that TikTok poses a threat to national security, a claim that ByteDance strenuously denies.

ByteDance and TikTok have been contacted for comment.