TikTok parent company ByteDance is suing a former intern in China for $1.1 million, saying he sabotaged the company’s artificial intelligence large language model training infrastructure.
Byte bounce The company filed a lawsuit with the Beijing Haidian District People’s Court demanding compensation of 8 million yuan from intern Tian Keyu, state media outlet Legal Weekly reported this week.
According to Legal Weekly, citing an internal Bytedance memo, Tian is suspected of manipulating the code of the training model and making unauthorized modifications to it.
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While lawsuits between companies and employees are common in China, legal action against interns seeking such huge sums is rare.
Before ByteDance filed the lawsuit, the case had attracted widespread attention in China because of its focus on artificial intelligence LL.M. training.
Global interest in the technology comes amid rapid advances in so-called generative artificial intelligence, which is used to produce text, images or other output from large amounts of data.
Its development is considered particularly important in China because the country The Race to Become an Artificial Intelligence Leader In a fierce technological war with Western competitors such as the United States.
ByteDance declined to comment on the lawsuit. Other Chinese media identified Tian as a graduate student at Peking University, but he did not respond to emails.
ByteDance said in a social media post in October that it fired Mr. Tian in August.
It also said that while there were rumors that the case cost ByteDance millions of dollars and involved more than 8,000 graphics processing units, these were “grossly exaggerated.”
- Vishakha Saxena Additional Editor, Reuters
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