TikTok owner fires intern who ‘maliciously interfered’ with AI project

TikTok’s China-based parent company ByteDance fired an intern for allegedly sabotaging a training session about artificial intelligence.

ByteDance confirmed the worker was canned in August after having “maliciously interfered” on a research project to train AI models.

The company denied reports that the intern cost it “tens of millions of dollars,” saying that those claims were “seriously exaggerated.”

“The intern involved maliciously interfered with the model training tasks of the commercial technology team’s research project, but it did not affect the formal commercial projects and online business, nor did it involve other businesses such as ByteDance’s large models,” the TikTok owner wrote in the post on a Chinese social news platform.

ByteDance, which employs more than 110,000 employees in more than 200 cities globally, is considered a tech leader when it comes to algorithm development.

Last month, it was reported that ByteDance planned to develop an AI model trained primarily with chips from Chinese firm Huawei Technologies.

ByteDance has diversified to domestic suppliers of chips used in artificial intelligence and accelerated development of its own since the US started restricting exports of advanced AI chips from firms like market leader Nvidia in 2022.

AI has become central in sectors as varied as gaming and e-commerce.

ByteDance’s next step in the AI race is to use Huawei’s Ascend 910B chip to train a large-language AI model, Reuters reported.

With Post Wires