Ex-intern sued by ByteDance wins top AI paper award

A research paper on artificial intelligence (AI) co-authored by Tian Keyu, the former ByteDance intern being sued by the Chinese tech giant for 8 million yuan (US$1.1 million) in damages after allegedly tampering with AI model training, has won a prestigious award.

The paper, titled “Visual Autoregressive Modeling: Scalable Image Generation via Next-Scale Prediction,” was recognized by the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems. Published by ByteDance’s commercial products and technology department in collaboration with Peking University, it explores a scalable method for image generation. Tian was cited as the first of its five authors.

The NeurIPS is an important annual global conference on machine learning and computational neuroscience. It rewarded OpenAI’s paper “DALL•E: Creating Images From Text” in 2020, which marked a breakthrough in text-to-image generation. This year’s event will start in Vancouver, Canada on Dec. 10.

ByteDance has filed a lawsuit in a Beijing court against Tian, seeking damages of 8 million yuan, 20,000 yuan in reasonable expenses, and a public apology, media reports said last month.

Between June and July, Tian, who worked in ByeDance’s commercial products and technology department, allegedly tampered with code to disrupt AI model training tasks during his internship, reportedly motivated by frustration over resource allocation, the Beijing-based ByteDance wrote in a report Nov. 5.

ByteDance terminated Tian’s contract and reported him to the Sunshine Integrity Alliance and Enterprise Anti-Fraud Alliance. The alliance, whose members include Alibaba Group Holding and Midea Group, is a platform for tackling corporate fraud and enhancing compliance.

ByteDance even reported Tian, a master’s student at Peking University, to his university, according to a company insider. He denied the accusation many times, blaming another intern for interfering with the code, and reported the alleged defamation to the police. ByteDance was alarmed by Tian’s lack of understanding of the incident’s gravity and subsequently sued him for violating the company’s security rules, the person added.

The incident exposed a fatal flaw in ByteDance’s technological security control, an industry insider said. He further noted that with companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic embracing open research practices and investing significantly in top talent, larger corporations like ByteDance risk losing their competitive edge in attracting leading scientists in the field.