The owner of TikTok has sacked an intern for allegedly sabotaging an internal artificial intelligence project.
ByteDance said it had dismissed the person in August after they “maliciously interfered” with the training of artificial intelligence (AI) models used in a research project.
Thanks to the video-sharing app TikTok and its Chinese counterpart, Douyin, which rank among the world’s most popular mobile apps, ByteDance has risen to become one of the world’s most important social media companies.
Like other big players in the tech sector, ByteDance has raced to embrace generative AI. Its Doubao chatbot earlier this year took over from the competitor Baidu’s Ernie in the race to produce a Chinese rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
ByteDance has also released wireless earbuds that are integrated with Doubao, allowing users to interact with the chatbot directly without a mobile phone.
The company commented on the sacking of the intern after rumours circulated widely on Chinese social media over the weekend.
In a statement posted on its news aggregator service, Toutiao, ByteDance said that an intern in the commercial technology team had been dismissed for serious disciplinary violations, according to a translation.
It added that its official commercial products and its large language models, the underlying technology for generative AI, had not been affected.
The company said that reports and rumours on social media contained exaggerations, including over the scale of the disruption. ByteDance said this included rumours that as many as 8,000 graphical processing units, the chips used to train AI models, were affected, and that losses were in the tens of millions of dollars.
ByteDance said that it had informed the intern’s university and industry associations about their conduct.
It comes amid scrutiny on tech companies around the world over the safety of generative AI models, and the effects of social media.
ByteDance also faces particular scrutiny in the US, where it is fighting against a threatened federal ban. The company has until 19 January to sell its stake in TikTok to an approved buyer or close it. The US government contends that TikTok is a national security threat, an allegation ByteDance strongly disputes.
ByteDance and TikTok were approached for comment.
