ByteDance denies reports that intern caused $10M in damages

ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, has fired an intern after they were found maliciously meddling with its artificial intelligence (AI) model.

Reports of an intern sabotaging ByteDance’s AI model surfaced across Chinese social media this weekend, but the tech giant states that these claims are exaggerated and contain inaccuracies.

The AI model in question is Doubao, China’s answer to ChatGPT, built on ByteDance’s artificial intelligence architecture.

On social media, posts surfaced saying that an intern had interfered with the AI model’s training process by inputting code into a powerful AI system with thousands of graphic processing units (GPUs).

The intern was allegedly motivated by dissatisfaction over a lack of resources allocated to the department.

The posts claimed the action caused tens of millions of dollars of damage.

However, ByteDance later denied this statement and said the interference had no impact on its main commercial products, online operations, or large language models.

According to the South China Morning Post, which first reported the story, the intern was a part of the commercialization technology team responsible for advertising its technology development.

ByteDance told the BBC that social media posts about the incident and some media reports contain inaccuracies. The company also denies losses of almost $10 million due to the event.