The incident led to speculation on Chinese social media about significant damage, including claims of losses worth tens of millions of dollars due to the disruption of a cluster with over 8,000 H100 GPUs.
ByteDance, however, dismissed these damage reports as exaggerated and inaccurate, per South China Morning Times.
The intern, whose identity remains undisclosed, was part of the company’s advertising technology team and did not work directly with ByteDance’s AI Lab. ByteDance has reported the misconduct to industry associations and the intern’s university for further action.
The company clarified that the sabotage did not affect any official commercial projects or its large language AI models, such as Doubao, which has become China’s leading generative AI app with 47 million monthly active users.
The intern’s LinkedIn and GitHub profiles, which reportedly showed affiliations with prestigious institutions like SenseTime, Oxford’s Torr Vision Group, and Peking University, were disputed by ByteDance, adding further complexity to the case.
This clarification followed rumors posted on platforms like GitHub, which included an audio recording allegedly of the intern admitting to uploading malicious code. ByteDance labeled some of these claims as false and inflated.
