Jakarta, domclub Indonesia
—
ByteDance
, the social media giant and parent of TikTok and Douyin, is suing a former intern for allegedly manipulating code and destroying training projects
artificial intelligence
(AI).
The company is demanding compensation of 8 million yuan (around Rp. 18.3 billion) as well as a public apology.The lawsuit has been accepted by the Haidian District Court in Beijing.
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Launch
South China Morning Post
, the incident began to emerge in October, when rumors circulated on Chinese social media that a ByteDance intern had caused major damage to the company’s large language model (LLM).
At that time, ByteDance confirmed that the individual had been suspended since August for “intentionally disrupting” training duties.
The company also denied speculation that the outage involved more than 8,000 GPUs and caused losses of tens of millions of US dollars, calling the claims exaggerated.
In an internal disciplinary notice this month, ByteDance identified an intern surnamed Tian as the perpetrator of acts of sabotage, driven by dissatisfaction with the distribution of resources within the team.
In the note, Tian was said to have changed the code and disrupted the model training process in a research project, which led to a large waste of resources.
ByteDance also reported its actions to two professional ethics organizations in China, the Trust and Integrity Enterprise Alliance and the Enterprise Anti-Fraud Alliance, and also to Tian’s university.
Even though various investigative steps have been taken, the former intern is said to continue to deny the allegations.This prompted ByteDance to take the case to court.
This case is in the public spotlight because ByteDance is accelerating the development of AI technology.ChatGPT-style conversational chatbot Doubao, launched in August 2023, became the most popular AI chatbot application in China with 51 million monthly active users as of October.
This number surpasses Baidu’s chatbot Wenxiaoyan (formerly Ernie Bot), which has 12.5 million users, as well as Alibaba-backed Moonshot AI’s Kimi, with 10 million users.Alibaba is the owner of the South China Morning Post.
China’s big tech companies, including ByteDance, Alibaba and Meituan, are also continuing to expand their AI initiatives in Silicon Valley, from opening new offices to recruiting top talent.
As they work to overcome US export restrictions that limit access to Nvidia’s advanced AI chips, which are critical to the development of cutting-edge models, according to reports
Financial Times
.
(wpj/dmi)
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