The award triggered speculation about whether the paper’s lead author was the ex-intern who ByteDance sued for US$1.1mil. — SCMP
An artificial intelligence (AI) study by researchers from social-media giant ByteDance and China’s Peking University received the “Outstanding Paper” award from this year’s Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), often referred to as the “Olympics of AI”.
The AI paper, “Visual Autoregressive Modelling: Scalable Image Generation via Next-Scale Prediction”, examined a unique approach to generating images at a faster speed with better quality and scalability. The award is expected to be given at the conference in Vancouver, Canada, from December 10 to 15.
It was one of the more than 50 research works from TikTok owner ByteDance that was accepted at this year’s NeurIPS. The other studies from the Beijing-based firm covered topics ranging from natural language processing, computer vision, machine learning and other subjects related to AI models.
The award has also triggered speculation about whether the lead author of the award-winning AI paper was the former intern who was sued and terminated by the company for tampering with code and sabotaging an AI training project.
The paper’s lead author is Tian Keyu, who bears the same surname as the ex-intern – identified only as “Tian” – who was dismissed by ByteDance in August. In its lawsuit before the Haidian District Court in Beijing, ByteDance is demanding 8mil yuan (US$1.1mil) in compensation as well as a public apology.
Neither ByteDance nor the paper’s lead author replied to a request for comment on Wednesday.
ByteDance mentioned its case against the former intern in an internal disciplinary notice, which stated that he was dissatisfied with the team’s resource allocation. The company said it also reported the ex-intern’s actions to two professional ethics organisations in China – the Trust and Integrity Enterprise Alliance and the Enterprise Anti-Fraud Alliance – as well as to his university.
Still, the former intern repeatedly denied any wrongdoing during the investigation, which led ByteDance to pursue legal action.
The lawsuit has drawn public attention, as ByteDance – the world’s most valuable unicorn, worth around US$300bil – has been ramping up its efforts in AI.
ByteDance has been actively recruiting prominent AI experts this year. Its recent hires included Huang Wenhao, a Microsoft alumnus and former vice-president at generative AI firm 01.AI, as well as Qin Yujia, the founder and chief executive of start-up Seq-AI.
Doubao, a ChatGPT-like conversational bot developed by ByteDance, recently emerged as the most popular AI app for Chinese consumers, with 51 million monthly active users, according to Aicpb.com, a website that tracks AI products. – South China Morning Post
