There’s very little detail in the article. I’d be curious to find out exactly what the intern’s responsibilities were, because based on the description in the article it seems like this was a failure of management, not the intern. Interns should never have direct access to production systems. In fact, in most parts of the world (though probably not China, I don’t know) interns are there to learn. They’re not supposed to do work that would otherwise be assigned to a paid employee, because that would make them an employee not an intern. Interns can shadow the paid employee to learn from them on the job, but interns are really not supposed to have any actual responsibilities beyond gaining experience for when they go on the job market.

Blaming the intern seems like a serious shift of responsibility. The fact that the intern was able to do this at all is the fault of management for not supervising their intern.

You can get more context from the comments at Hacker News. Below is taken from from one of the comment:

Translated by ChatGPT.

Summary:

10/18:

Translation of the provided text:

Title: Urgent Warning

The “reputation washing” behavior of Tian Keyu has been extremely harmful

For the past two months, Tian Keyu has maliciously attacked the cluster code, causing significant harm to nearly 30 employees of various levels, wasting nearly a quarter’s worth of work by his colleagues. All records and audits clearly confirm these undeniable facts:

1. Modified the PyTorch source code of the cluster, including random seeds, optimizers, and data loaders.

2. Randomly killed multi-machine experiment processes, causing significant experiment delays.

3. Opened login backdoors through checkpoints, automatically initiating random process terminations.

4. Participated in daily troubleshooting meetings for cluster faults, continuing to modify attack codes based on colleagues’ troubleshooting ideas.

5. Altered colleagues’ model weights, rendering experimental results unreproducible.

It’s unimaginable how Tian Keyu could continue his attacks with such malice, seeing colleagues’ experiments inexplicably interrupted or fail, after hearing their debugging strategies and specifically modifying the attack codes in response, and witnessing colleagues working overnight with no progress. After being dismissed by the company, he received no penalties from the school or advisors and even began to whitewash his actions on various social media platforms. Is this the school and advisors’ tolerance of Tian Keyu’s behavior? We expect this evidence disclosure to attract the attention of relevant parties and for definitive penalties to be imposed on Tian Keyu, reflecting the social responsibility of higher education institutions to educate and nurture.

We cannot allow someone who has committed such serious offenses to continue evading justice, even beginning to distort facts and whitewash his wrongdoing! Therefore, we decide to stand on behalf of all justice advocates and reveal the evidence of Tian Keyu’s malicious cluster attack!

Tian Keyu, if you deny any part of these malicious attack behaviors, or think the content here smears you, please present credible evidence! We are willing to disclose more evidence as the situation develops, along with your shameless ongoing attempts to whitewash. We guarantee the authenticity and accuracy of all evidence and are legally responsible for the content of the evidence. If necessary, we are willing to disclose our identities and confront Tian Keyu face-to-face.

Thanks to those justice advocates, you do not need to apologize; you are heroes who dare to speak out.

Link to the inquiry recording of Tian Keyu: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEYbYW--qN8

Personal homepage of Tian Keyu: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=6FdkbygAAAAJ&hl=en

GitHub homepage of Tian Keyu: https://github.com/keyu-tian

10/19:

Clarification Regarding the “Intern Sabotaging Large Model Training” Incident

Recently, some media reported that “ByteDance’s large model training was attacked by an intern.” After internal verification by the company, it was confirmed that an intern from the commercial technology team committed a serious disciplinary violation and has been dismissed. However, the related reports also contain some exaggerations and inaccuracies, which are clarified as follows:

1. The intern involved maliciously interfered with the model training tasks of the commercial technology team’s research project, but this did not affect the official commercial projects or online operations, nor did it involve ByteDance’s large model or other businesses.

2. Rumors on the internet about “involving over 8,000 cards and losses of millions of dollars” are greatly exaggerated.

3. Upon verification, it was confirmed that the individual in question had been interning in the commercial technology team, and had no experience interning at AI Lab. Their social media bio and some media reports are incorrect.

The intern was dismissed by the company in August. The company has also reported their behavior to the industry alliance and the school they attend, leaving further actions to be handled by the school.

Token API key go brrrrrr?

Sad