BeijingThe case, which has garnered a lot of interest in China amid a fierce AI race, involves China’s ByteDance suing a former intern for $1.1 million on the grounds that he intentionally targeted its artificial intelligence large language model training infrastructure.
According to a story published this week by the state-owned Legal Weekly, the parent company of TikTok has filed a lawsuit in the Haidian District People’s Court in Beijing, requesting 8 million yuan ($1.1 million) in damages from the former intern, Tian Keyu.
Although lawsuits between employers and workers are frequent in China, it is uncommon for an intern to be sued for such a high amount of money.
The case’s focus on AI LLM training—a technique that generates text, images, and other output from massive amounts of data—has garnered international attention in the midst of major technological advancements in so-called generative AI.
On Thursday, ByteDance refrained from commenting on the complaint. Tian, who has been identified by other Chinese media outlets as a Peking University postgraduate student, did not immediately reply to emails.
According to an internal ByteDance memo obtained by Legal Weekly, Tian is accused of purposefully undermining the team’s model training tasks through code tampering and unlawful modifications.
ByteDance said on social media in October that company had fired the intern in August. It claimed that although there were speculations that ByteDance had suffered losses in the millions due to the lawsuit, which involved more than 8,000 graphics processing units, they were greatly overstated.
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