ByteDance seeks US11 million in damages from exintern who sabotaged AI project South China Morning Post

pSocialmedia giant ByteDance mentioned the lawsuit in an internal disciplinary notice which identified the intern by his surnameppByteDance the owner of TikTok and Douyin filed a lawsuit against a former intern accusing him of tampering with code and sabotaging an artificial intelligence AI training project and demanding 8 million yuan US11 million in compensation as well as a public apology according to a local media reportppThe case has already been accepted by the Haidian District Court in Beijing Chinese media outlet Southern Metropolis Daily reported on WednesdayppIn October rumours circulated on Chinese social media suggesting that a ByteDance interns actions targeting the companys large language model LLM had caused significant damage At the time ByteDance clarified that the individual was terminated in August for maliciously interfering with a training taskppHowever the company disputed speculation that the disruption involved more than 8000 graphics processing units and resulted in losses amounting to tens of millions of US dollars calling such claims exaggeratedppThis month ByteDance included the case in an internal disciplinary notice which identified the intern surnamed Tian as having acted out of dissatisfaction with the teams resource allocationppThe notice stated that Tian tampered with code to disrupt a research projects model training work causing significant waste of resources The company said it reported Tians actions to two professional ethics organisations in China the Trust and Integrity Enterprise Alliance and the Enterprise AntiFraud Alliance as well as to Tians universityppDespite these measures the former intern repeatedly denied any wrongdoing during the investigations leading the company to pursue legal action the Southern Metropolis Daily reported citing an unnamed internal sourcep