AI may take our jobs, but first, AI could cost us our internship. That's what allegedly happened to an unnamed student who was part of a big AI project by ByteDance, TikTok's parent company.reports that ByteDance confirmed it terminated an intern back in August for what it described as"malicious interference" with an internal AI model training project.
Speculation swirled on social media about the intern's motives, with some posts claiming the disruption was an act of protest over resource allocation, allegedly targeting a training session using a cluster of over eight thousand GPUs – a hefty setup valued at millions. ByteDance was quick to call these claims overblown, asserting that the event was nowhere near as catastrophic as suggested.
Doubao has become a major hit, boasting 47 million monthly active users in September – far outpacing Baidu’s Ernie Bot, recently rebranded as Wenxiaoyan, and Moonshot AI’s Kimi, with 12 million and 7 million users respectively. ByteDance responded, noting that while the intern had previous experience with top-tier organizations like SenseTime and the University of Oxford’s Torr Vision Group, some details shared on LinkedIn and GitHub about the intern’s experience at ByteDance were either misleading or inaccurate.