Still cringing over your first internship? You didn't try sabotage a project of one of China's largest tech companies

Internships are a great way to gain work experience. Even if you don't mess up the office coffee order ("What does it mean that it should be the color of "burnt almonds? '"), You still feel like you don't know enough. You can rest assured that whatever career mistake you made in the early years, it won't be as bad a story as this former intern, who used to work at ByteDance (the owner of the embattled video app TikTok).

You may have heard a rumour mill version of this story. It goes something like, "intern injects malicious software into AI model, sabotaging 8000 GPUs and causing ByteDance tens millions of dollars in losses." ByteDance has also created Doubao - a popular AI chatbot Bloomberg described as "China's Answer to ChatGPT."

In a recent post on social media, ByteDance claimed that none of its commercial projects had been affected by the rumoured act of sabotage. Their statement, however, reveals that this story is not over (via Ars Technica).

ByteDance confirmed that the intern was terminated in August for "serious discipline violations" including "maliciously (interfering with) the model training tasks for at least one project." ByteDance says the situation was so serious that it warranted reporting the intern's behavior to their university and industry contacts in addition.

According to ByteDance's statement, the intern was a part of their commercial technology team and not their AI laboratory. Some translations of ByteDance’s statement suggest the intern was a part of an advertising rather than technical team. However, commenters under the social posting dispute this distinction, claiming the commercial technology team is part of AI lab.

ByteDance says that the intern misrepresented certain details on their social media profiles, and a number reports resulting from this have overstated the situation. These 8000 GPUs, and the alleged millions of dollars lost? The company claims that this was "seriously overstated" but doesn't go into detail about the actual figures. Commenters may have taken offense at this ambiguity and accused ByteDance for downplaying the damage.

A ByteDance Intern, who was fired after this incident, interfered with the AI model training of the company. The company says the damage was not as extensive as rumours suggested, but is unwilling to state how significant it really was. However, the school of the former intern has been involved in disciplinary actions. You thought your work experience had been a disaster.