ByteDance has recently issued an official response to rumors about an "intern disrupting large-scale model training." The company confirmed that a malicious intern did indeed interfere with the research project model training tasks of the commercial technology team, but this action did not affect the company's formal commercial projects and online services, nor did it involve other large-scale model businesses of ByteDance.
Additionally, ByteDance pointed out that the claims circulating online about "involving over 8,000 cards and resulting in millions of dollars in losses" are greatly exaggerated.
According to public reports, during the intern's tenure at ByteDance's commercial technology team, due to dissatisfaction with team resource allocation, the intern exploited a vulnerability on the Hugging Face platform and used attack code to sabotage the team's model training tasks.
Currently, the intern has been dismissed, and ByteDance has reported the incident to industry alliances and the intern's school.
Technical security experts have pointed out that this incident exposes security management issues in ByteDance's technical training, as the company failed to properly segregate permissions and audit shared code. Under normal circumstances, any significant code changes must be audited, with records of who operated what, making it impossible for one individual to tamper with the code.
Recently, ByteDance has been heavily investing in AI technology, including the popular Doubao chatbot, AI video generation tool Ji Meng, and AI music generation tool Sponge Music, among others.
Furthermore, ByteDance plans to invest approximately 1 billion ringgit (about $2.13 billion) in Malaysia to establish an AI center, aiming to promote digital economic development in the region. This indicates ByteDance's determination and investment intensity in the AI field.
