Last weekend, ByteDance – TikTok’s parent company – confirmed that it had fired an intern after the news went viral on Chinese social media.

Accordingly, the intern is accused of adding code and changing parameters on a group of computers, essentially implanting a virus into the AI ​​training system and causing damage of up to $10 million.

This person even attended meetings about the impact of the virus and “pretended not to know anything”.

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ByteDance fires an intern for sabotaging AI model training system. Photo: Bloomberg

The firing took place in August, according to a post on the Toutiao news platform. The intern was in the commercial technology team and had no experience in an AI lab. The company has notified the intern’s university for disciplinary action.

The Chinese tech giant also partially denied the rumors surrounding the incident, claiming that the tens of millions of dollars in damages and the involvement of 8,000 GPU cards were "seriously exaggerated."

The intern's actions do not affect ByteDance's online business, commercial projects or larger models.

Despite being valued at $220 billion thanks to TikTok, ByteDance started behind other tech companies in the AI ​​race.

The company quietly released the Doubao chatbot last year, using technology from ChatGPT. By May, Doubao had overtaken Baidu as China’s most popular AI chatbot.

According to financial services firm Unique Capital, Doubao's download rate — as well as ByteDance's video editing app CapCut — outpaced ChatGPT in July.

(According to Fortune)