ByteDance sues ex-intern $1.1m over alleged AI sabotage

• Published On: 30 November 2024 at 20:25

TikTok's parent firm, China's ByteDance, has filed a lawsuit demanding $1.1 million in damages from a former intern, accusing him of willfully undermining its artificial intelligence system.

The lawsuit, which has received a lot of attention in China as part of the continuing AI competition, was filed in the Haidian District People's Court of Beijing. According to a report by the state-owned Legal Weekly, ByteDance is demanding 8 million yuan ($1.1 million) from Tian Keyu, a postgraduate student at Peking University.

While legal disagreements between employers and employees are not uncommon in China, the scope of this lawsuit—targeting an intern for such a large sum—is unprecedented and has generated broad curiosity.

The case focuses on ByteDance's AI big language model training infrastructure, a critical technology in the fast evolving field of generative AI that generates text, images, and other material from massive datasets.

According to Legal Weekly, ByteDance claims that Tian purposefully disrupted the company's AI model training by modifying code and making unauthorized system changes.

The firm reportedly fired Tian in August, and while rumors circulated that the event cost millions of dollars and harmed over 8,000 graphics processing units (GPUs), ByteDance refuted these accusations as "seriously exaggerated."

The lawsuit has received special attention because it focuses on AI, a subject that has become a beehive of rivalry and innovation around the world.