Rumors have surfaced alleging that an intern at the Chinese internet technology company ByteDance injected destructive code into the company’s GPU cluster recently due to dissatisfaction with team resource allocation, causing significant economic losses to the company.
On October 18th, a message circulated in various WeChat groups: “An intern at a top company infiltrated the large model training, injecting destructive code that rendered the training results unreliable, potentially necessitating retraining. It is said that over 8,000 cards were injected with the infiltrated code, leading to potential losses surpassing tens of millions of dollars.”
According to sources, the top company mentioned is ByteDance. The incident occurred in June this year, stemming from a Ph.D. student from a university interning with ByteDance’s commercial technology team, who used attack code to disrupt the team’s model training tasks due to dissatisfaction with resource allocation.
The rumor indicates that the intern with the surname Tian utilized a vulnerability in HuggingFace to write destructive code into the company’s shared models, causing fluctuating training effects that did not meet expectations, and the AML team could not verify the cause.
Sources claim that ByteDance has internally confirmed that the actions were carried out by the intern named Tian. Currently, the intern has been dismissed. Allegedly, the intern attacked not the Dou Bao big model but the commercial technology team’s model training tasks.
According to public information, ByteDance’s Dou Bao big model team was established in 2023, dedicated to developing AI large model technology. Previously, ByteDance collaborated with universities such as Peking University and Tsinghua University on big data and artificial intelligence technologies. The core competitiveness of ByteDance’s short video social platforms, Douyin and TikTok, lies in AI algorithms continuously optimized through big data.
In March this year, the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill with 352 votes to 65, requiring ByteDance to sell TikTok, or else TikTok would be banned in the U.S. within six months. U.S. federal senators believe that ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, is working for the Chinese Communist Party, posing a threat to U.S. national security.
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