TikTok Owner Fires Intern for Sabotaging AI Project
ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok, says it has dismissed an intern for sabotaging an internal artificial intelligence project, more precisely, “maliciously interfering” with the training of one of its AI models. ByteDance fired them in August. The company informed their university and industry bodies about the incident.
“The individual was an intern with the [advertising] technology team and has no experience with the AI Lab,” ByteDance confirmed in a statement posted on its news aggregator service, Toutiao, after the incident spread on social media.
Social media claims stated the ill-intentioned actions of the unnamed individual had affected as many as 8,000 graphical processing units (GPUs), which are chips used to train AI models, resulting in damages of up to $10 million. ByteDance denied those claims, saying they “contain some exaggerations and inaccuracies.”
The company added that the incident didn’t affect its official commercial products, including the large language models that power its generative AI products.
Like every big tech player nowadays, ByteDance invests heavily in generative AI. As a result, the company launched the Doubao chatbot earlier this year. The Chinese ChatGPT rival has quickly become the country’s most popular AI chatbot. ByteDance also developed wireless earbuds for Doubao, allowing users to interact with it directly without a mobile phone.
ByteDance uses AI across many other applications, including a text-to-video tool called Jimeng.
Aside from TikTok, ByteDance also owns the Chinese version of the video-sharing platform – Douyin.
TikTok is at risk of facing a ban in the US if its Chinese parent doesn’t sell the stakes in the social media platform to an approved buyer or close it by January 19th next year. This is because the US government considers TikTok a national security threat, an allegation ByteDance disputes.
Some TikTok creators responded with a lawsuit against the US government over the possible TikTok ban, claiming it hurts their First Amendment rights.
That said, recently, it has been under scrutiny for allowing the dangerous “Blackout Challenge” to spread on its platform, which contributed to the death of a ten-year-old.
