The owner of TikTok fired an intern for allegedly sabotaging an internal artificial intelligence project.
ByteDance said it had fired the person in August after he “maliciously interfered” with the training of artificial intelligence (AI) models used in a research project.
Thanks to video-sharing app TikTok and its Chinese counterpart Douyin, which are among the most popular mobile apps in the world, ByteDance has become one of the largest social media companies in the world.
Like other big players in the tech sector, ByteDance has been quick to embrace generative AI. Its chatbot Doubao earlier this year took over from competitor Baidu’s Ernie in the race to produce a Chinese rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
ByteDance also launched wireless headsets integrated with Doubao, allowing users to interact with the chatbot directly without a mobile phone.
The company commented on the intern’s dismissal after rumors circulated widely on Chinese social media over the weekend.
In a statement posted on its news aggregation service, Toutiao, ByteDance said an intern on the trading technology team had been fired for serious disciplinary violations, according to a translation.
It added that its official commercial products and large language models, the underlying technology for generative AI, had not been affected.
The company said reports and rumors on social media contained exaggerations, including about the magnitude of the outage. 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 had informed the interns’ university and industry associations about their conduct.
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It comes amid scrutiny on technology companies around the world over the safety of generative AI models and the effects of social media.
ByteDance also faces particular scrutiny in the United States, where it is fighting a threatened federal ban. The company has until January 19 to sell its stake in TikTok to an approved buyer or close it. The US government maintains that TikTok is a threat to national security, an accusation that ByteDance strongly disputes.
ByteDance and TikTok have been contacted for comment.
