[HN Gopher] ByteDance sacks intern for sabotaging AI project
___________________________________________________________________
ByteDance sacks intern for sabotaging AI project
Author : beedeebeedee
Score : 204 points
Date : 2024-10-21 03:21 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| userbinator wrote:
| I hope said intern finds a new job working for anti-AI causes.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| Are there are a lot of anti-AI organizations at this point?
| PauseAI is the main one I'm familiar with:
|
| https://pauseai.info/
|
| One thing I suspect investors in e.g. OpenAI are failing to
| price in is the political and regulatory headwinds OpenAI will
| face if their fantastical revenue projections actually
| materialize. A world where OpenAI is making $100B in annual
| revenue will likely be a world where technological unemployment
| looms quite clearly. Polls already show strong support for
| regulating AI.
| bawolff wrote:
| Regulation is not neccesarily bad for the market leader.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| The Amish?
|
| I'm trying to think of whether it'd be worth starting some
| kind of semi-Luddite community where we can use digital
| technology, photos, radios, spreadsheets and all, but the
| line is around 2014, when computers still did the same thing
| every time. That's my biggest gripe with AI, the
| nondeterminism, the non-repeatability making it all
| undebuggable, impossible to interrogate and reason about. A
| computer in 2014 is complex but not incomprehensible. The
| mass matrix multiplication of 2024 computation is totally
| opaque and frankly I think there's room for a society without
| such black box oracles.
| fragmede wrote:
| Why 2014? Why not 2022 when ChatGPT was released? Or 2019
| for ChatGPT 2? Why not 2005 when the first dual-core
| Pentium was released? After that, the two cores meant that
| you could be sure what order your program would run things.
| Or why not 2012 when Intel added the RdRand instruction to
| x86? Or 2021 when Linux 5.17 was released with random
| number generation improvements? Or 1985 when IEEE 754
| floating point was released. Before that, it was all
| integer math but after that, 0.1 + 0.2 =
| 0.30000000000000004. Not that I have any objection to 2014,
| I'm just wondering why you chose then.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| If I was really picky I would stop the clock in the 8bit
| era or at least well before speculative execution /
| branch prediction, but I do want to leave some room for
| pragmatism.
|
| 2014 is when I became aware of gradient descent and how
| entropy was used to search more effectively, leading to
| different runs of the same program arriving at different
| results, Deep Dream came soon after and it's been
| downhill from there
|
| If I were to write some regulations for what was allowed
| in my computing community I would make an exception for
| using PRNGs for scientific simulation and cryptographic
| purposes, but definitely I would draw a line at using
| heuristics to find optimal solutions. Slide rules got us
| to the moon and that's good enough for me.
| 542458 wrote:
| Fwiw, the Amish aren't luddites, they're not anti-
| technology in all facets of life. You'll see Amish folks
| using power tools, cellphones, computers, etc in their
| professional lives or outside the context of their homes
| (exact standards vary by community). There are even
| multiple companies that manufacture computers specifically
| for the Amish. So there's no reason an Amish business
| couldn't use AI.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| Don't they have a process for determining whether new
| technology should be integrated into their lives?
| 542458 wrote:
| Yes, the exact process varies by community but it
| generally involves church elders meeting to discuss
| whether a new technology is likely to benefit or harm
| family, community and spiritual life.
| sadeshmukh wrote:
| Regulation supports the big players. See SB 1047 in
| California and read the first few lines: > comply with
| various requirements, including implementing the capability
| to promptly enact a full shutdown, as defined, and implement
| a written and separate safety and security protocol, as
| specified
|
| That absolutely kills open source, and it's disguised as a
| "safety" bill where safety means absolutely nothing (how are
| you "shutting down" an LLM?). There's a reason Anthropic was
| championing it even though it evidently regulates AI.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| >That absolutely kills open source
|
| Zvi says this claim is false:
| https://thezvi.substack.com/p/guide-to-
| sb-1047?open=false#%C...
|
| >how are you "shutting down" an LLM?
|
| Pull the plug on the server? Seems like it's just about
| having a protocol in place to make that easy in case of an
| emergency. Doesn't seem that onerous.
| Tostino wrote:
| Which server? The one you have no idea about because you
| released your weights and anyone can download/use them at
| that point?
| sadeshmukh wrote:
| To be fair, I don't really agree with the concept of
| "safety" in AI in the whole Terminator-esque thing that
| is propagated by seemingly a lot of people. Safety is
| always in usage, and the cat's already out of the bag. I
| just don't know what harm they're trying to prevent
| anyways at all.
| pjc50 wrote:
| SAG-AFTRA are currently on strike over the issue of
| unauthorized voice cloning.
|
| The AI advocates actively advertised AI as a tool for
| replacing creatives, including plagiarizing their work, and
| copying the appearance and voices of individuals. It's not
| really surprising that everyone in the creative industries is
| going to use what little power they have to avoid this
| doomsday scenario.
| bawolff wrote:
| People who sabotage things tend to do it against all sides (you
| can always find an excuse to sabotage if you try hard enough).
| tommica wrote:
| > People who sabotage things tend to do it against all sides
| (you can always find an excuse to sabotage if you try hard
| enough).
|
| 'Holy Generalization, Batman!'
| xvector wrote:
| I hope he spends a good long bit in prison
| Aurornis wrote:
| The story going around is that the sabotage was to make their
| own AI projects look better than their peers.
|
| This wasn't an anti-AI crusader. It was petty office politics.
| peterkos wrote:
| I'm reminded of a time that an intern took down us-east1 on AWS,
| by modifying a configuration file they shouldn't have had access
| to. Amazon (somehow) did the correct thing and didn't fire them
| -- instead, they used the experience to fix the security hole. It
| was a file they shouldn't have _had_ access to in the first
| place.
|
| If the intern "had no experience with the AI lab", is it the
| right thing to do to fire them, instead of admitting that there
| is a security/access fault internally? Can other employees
| (intentionally, or unintentionally) cause that same amount of
| "damage"?
| raihansaputra wrote:
| afaik this was intentional in that they stopped training runs
| and changing parameters for other employee training runs, and
| even joined in on the debugging group trying to solve the
| "issues".
| dudus wrote:
| The difference in this case is intent.
|
| Did the employee have the intent to cause damage? If so just
| fire him/her.
| danpalmer wrote:
| _Malicious_ intent to be precise. Well-intentioned attempts
| to demonstrate issues for the purposes of helping to fix
| should generally not be punished, unless there is a wider
| fallout than expected and that can be attributed to
| negligence.
| grogenaut wrote:
| From what I've seen in Amazon it's pretty consistent that they
| do not blame the messenger which is what they consider the
| person who messed up. Usually that person is the last in a long
| series of decisions that could have prevented the issue, and
| thus why blame them. That is unless the person is a) acting
| with malice, b) is repeatedly shown a pattern of willful
| ignorance. IIRC, when one person took down S3 with a manual
| command overriding the safeguards the action was not to fire
| them but to figure out why it was still a manual process
| without sign off. Say what you will about Amazon culture, the
| ability to make mistakes or call them out is pretty
| consistently protected.
| tgavVs wrote:
| > From what I've seen in Amazon it's pretty consistent that
| they do not blame the messenger which is what they consider
| the person who messed up
|
| Interesting that my experience has been the exact opposite.
|
| Whenever I've participated in COE discussions (incident
| analysis), questions have been focused on highlighting who
| made the mistake or who didn't take the right precautions.
| dockerd wrote:
| That was not the idea of COE ever. Probably you were in bad
| org/team.
| kelnos wrote:
| Or maybe you were in an unusually good team?
|
| I always chuckle a little when the response to "I had a
| bad experience" is "I didn't, so you must be an outlier".
| donavanm wrote:
| No. The majority of teams and individuals are using it as
| intended, to understand and prevent future issues from
| process and tool defects. The complaints Ive heard are
| usually correlated with other indicators of a
| "bad"/punitive team culture, a lower level IC not
| understanding process or intent, or shades of opinion
| like "its a lot of work and I dont see the benefit. Ergo
| its malicious or naive."
|
| I worked at aws for 13 years, was briefly in the
| reliability org that owns the COE (post incident
| analysis) tooling, and spent a lot if time on "ops" for
| about 5 years.
| grogenaut wrote:
| I've bar raised a ton of them. You do end up figuring out
| what actions by what operator caused what issues or didn't
| work well, but that's to diagnose what
| controls/processes/tools/metrics were missing. I always
| removed the actual people's name as part of the bar
| raising, well before publishing, usually before any manager
| sees it. Instead used Oncall 1, or Oncall for X team,
| Manager for X team. And that's mainly for the timeline.
|
| As a sibling said you were likely in a bad or or one that
| was using COEs punatively.
| mlyle wrote:
| In the article's case, there's evidence of actual malice,
| though-- sabotaging only large jobs, over a month's time.
| fragmede wrote:
| All I got from the linked article was
|
| > TikTok owner, ByteDance, says it has sacked an intern
| for "maliciously interfering" with the training of one of
| its artificial intelligence (AI) models.
|
| Are there other links with additional info?
| mlyle wrote:
| A lot of the original social media sources have been
| pulled, but this is what was alleged on social media:
|
| https://juejin.cn/post/7426926600422637594
|
| https://github.com/JusticeFighterDance/JusticeFighter110
|
| https://x.com/0xKyon/status/1847529300163252474
| fragmede wrote:
| Thanks. Google translate off the first link:
|
| > He exploited the vulnerability of huggingface's load
| ckpt function to inject code, dynamically modifying other
| people's optimizer to randomly sleep for a short period
| of time, and modifying the direction of parameter
| shaving. He also added a condition that only tasks with
| more than 256 cards would trigger this condition.
|
| Okay yeah that's malicious and totally a crime.
| "modifying the direction of parameter shaving" means he
| subtly corrupted his co-workers work. that's wild!
| mlyle wrote:
| Some of the sources say that he sat in the incident
| meetings during troubleshooting and adjusted his attacks
| to avoid detection, too.
| justinclift wrote:
| Wonder what the underlying motive was? Seems like a super
| weird thing to do.
| tyingq wrote:
| Could be just so his work looked better in comparison. Or
| something more sinister, like being paid to slow
| progress.
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| LMAO that's just diabolical. Wonder what motivated them.
| yorwba wrote:
| "parameter shaving" (Can Shu Ti Du ) is, by the way, a
| typo for "parameter gradient" (Can Shu Ti Du ), Ti Du
| being the gradient and Ti Du being a tonsure.
| aitchnyu wrote:
| Whats bar raising in this context?
| bspammer wrote:
| https://www.aboutamazon.co.uk/news/working-at-
| amazon/what-is...
| kelnos wrote:
| Usually I hear it in the context of a person outside the
| team added to an interview panel, to help ensure that the
| hiring team is adhering to company-wide hiring standards,
| not the team's own standards, where they may differ.
|
| But in this case I'm guessing their incident analysis
| teams also get an unrelated person added to them, in
| order to have an outside perspective? Seems confusing to
| overload the term like that, if that's the case.
| grogenaut wrote:
| They are the same role different specialties. Like saying
| SDE for ML or for Distributed Systems or Clients.
|
| you can usually guess from context but what you say is
| "we need a bar raiser for this hiring loop" or "get a bar
| raiser for this COE" or "get a bar raiser for the UI",
| there are qualified bar raisers for each setting.
| notyourwork wrote:
| Bar raisers for COE are those who review the document for
| detail, resolution, detailed root cause and a clear set
| of action items to prioritize which will eliminate or
| reduce chance or reoccurrence.
|
| It's a person with experience.
| donavanm wrote:
| As I recall the coe tool "automated reviewer" checks
| cover this. It should flag any content that looks like a
| person (or customer name) before the author submits it.
| geon wrote:
| Isn't that a necessary step in figuring out the issue and
| how t prevent it?
| sokoloff wrote:
| I've run the equivalent process at my company and I
| absolutely want us to figure out who took the triggering
| actions, what data/signals they were looking at, what
| exactly they did, etc.
|
| If you don't know what happened and can't ask more details
| about it, how can you possibly reduce the likelihood (or
| impact) of it in the future?
|
| Finding out in detail _who did it_ does not require you to
| punish that person and having a track record of _not
| punishing_ them helps you find out the details in future
| incidents.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| But when that person was identified, were they personally
| held responsible, bollocked, and reprimanded or were they
| involved in preventing the issue from happening again?
|
| "No blame, but no mercy" is one of these adages; while you
| shouldn't blame individuals for something that is an
| organization-wide problem, you also shouldn't hold back in
| preventing it from happening again.
| grogenaut wrote:
| Usually helping prevent the issue, training. Almost
| everyone I've ever seen cause an outage is so "oh shit oh
| shit oh shit" that a reprimand is worthless, I've spent
| more time a) talking them through what they could have
| done better and, encouraging them to escalate quicker b)
| assusaging their fears that it was all their fault and
| they'll be blamed / fired. "I just want you to know we
| don't consider this your fault. It was not your fault.
| Many many people made poor risk tradeoffs for us to get
| to the point where you making X trivial change caused the
| internet to go down"
|
| In some cases like interns we probably just took their
| commit access away or blocked their direct push access.
| Now a days interns can't touch critical systems and can't
| push code directly to prod packages.
| evanextreme wrote:
| At least in my experience, this is also how Azure continues
| to function. Certainly reduces stress in the working
| environment
| Twirrim wrote:
| > when one person took down S3 with a manual command
| overriding the safeguards
|
| It didn't override safeguards, but they sure wanted you to
| think that something unusual was done as part of the
| incident. What they executed was a standard operational
| command. The problem was, the components that that command
| interacted with had been creaking at the edges for _years_ by
| that point. It was literally a case of "when", and not "if".
| All that happened was the command tipped it over the edge in
| combination with everything else happening as part of normal
| operational state.
|
| Engineering leadership had repeatedly raised the risk with
| further up the chain and no one was willing to put headcount
| to actually mitigating the problem. If blame was to be
| applied anywhere, it wasn't on the engineer following the run
| book that gave them a standard operational command to execute
| with standard values. They did exactly what they were
| supposed to.
|
| Some credit where it's due, my understanding from folks I
| knew still in that space, is that S3 leadership started
| turning things around after that incident and started taking
| these risks and operational state seriously.
| DrillShopper wrote:
| It's a shame that they're so bad at (physically) delivering
| their products these days.
| notyourwork wrote:
| Precisely, if you ship if, you own it. So ownership isn't the
| individual but rather the team and company. Blaming a human
| for an error that at least another engineer likely code
| reviewed, a team probably discussed prioritizing and
| eventually lead to degradation is a poor way to prevent it
| from happening again.
| kleton wrote:
| It was one of the STEP interns that took down Google prod by
| modifying some config file by putting something erroneous into
| an automated tool. Everyone at the company was locked out, and
| someone had to physically access some machines in a datacenter
| to recover.
| EE84M3i wrote:
| I'd like to learn more about the AWS incident, but when I
| google "us-east1 intern" I get this comment. Do you have a
| link?
| rafram wrote:
| Probably this: https://aws.amazon.com/message/41926/
| donavanm wrote:
| No. That was operational modification of system state using
| existing tools. The "miss" was an intended subset filter
| that was not interpreted correctly.
|
| > an authorized S3 team member using an established
| playbook executed a command which was intended to remove a
| small number of servers for one of the S3 subsystems that
| is used by the S3 billing process. Unfortunately, one of
| the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a
| larger set of servers was removed than intended.
|
| As of a while back that entire state management subsystem,
| which dates from the very beginning of AWS, has been
| replaced.
|
| Source: me. I was oncall for (some of) the incident
| management of that event.
| bawolff wrote:
| There is a huge difference between someone making a mistake and
| someone intentionally sabotaging.
|
| You're not firing the person because they broke stuff, you are
| firing them because they _tried_ to break stuff. If the attempt
| was a failure and caused no harm, you would still fire them.
| Its not about the damage they caused its that they wanted to
| cause damage.
| ozim wrote:
| But for damaging company assets on purpose firing is only
| first step.
|
| I do not see any mention of other legal action and article is
| shallow.
|
| It might've been that someone in command chain called it
| "malicious" to cover up his own mistakes. I think that is
| parent poster point while writing out Amazon story.
| bawolff wrote:
| Maybe, but without any other info, i kind of have to take
| the info provided at face value. Like obviously if the
| article is inaccurate the whole situation should be viewed
| differently.
| andmarios wrote:
| The article says: As well as firing the
| person in August, ByteDance said it had informed the
| intern's university and industry bodies about the incident.
| noobermin wrote:
| It's a Chinese company, saving face is far more important for
| them than "teaching lessons" to anyone, particularly employees
| who are probably considered expendable.
| throw3828455 wrote:
| I always laugh when I see these predictable comments about
| "face" when talking about Asian companies, like they are so
| beholden to their culture they can't make individual
| judgments.
|
| I wonder if we applied this culture talk to Western companies
| how funny it would sound.
|
| The reason Facebook is firing so many people is because
| individualism "is far more important for them than 'teaching
| lessons' to anyone, particularly employees who are probably
| considered expendable."
| simplify wrote:
| I don't get it, aren't individual judgements made in the
| context of culture?
|
| How does your example sound funny?
| gwervc wrote:
| Every company worldwide, including US ones are trying to
| "save face" when anything bad happens. This is why we
| have corporate speech.
| simplify wrote:
| Certainly, but how they go about it differs depending on
| their values, no?
| donavanm wrote:
| I worked at AWS for 13 years. I did "aws call leader" for 7
| years, and worked in the reliability org when we rebuilt the
| coe tool. Ive personally blown up a service or two, and know
| other PEs whove done the same or larger.
|
| Ive never heard of an individual being terminated or
| meaningfully punished for making an earnest mistake, regardless
| of impact. I do know of people who were rapid term'd for
| malicious, or similar, actions like sharing internal
| information or (attempting to) subvert security controls.
|
| On the whole I did see Amazon "do the right thing" around
| improving process and tools; people are a fallible _part_ of a
| system, accountability requires authority, incremental
| improvements today over a hypothetical tomorrow.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| PAM debacle (17Q4) in Device Econ is a counter example.
|
| And that wasn't even a mistake the SDEs made -- they were
| punished for the economists being reckless and subsequently
| bullied out of the company, despite the SDEs trying to raise
| the alarm the whole time.
| donavanm wrote:
| Is that devices as in digital/alexa land? Never had too
| much overlap there. AWS and CDO were discrete for incident
| and problem management after '14 or soz
| zmgsabst wrote:
| Yeah -- my point was Amazon is very large and standards
| vary. I won't pretend I know the whole picture, but I've
| seen retaliation against SDEs multiple times.
|
| I've heard mixed things about CDO, positive things about
| AWS, but where I worked in Devices and FinTech were both
| wild... to the point FinTech (circa 2020) didn't even use
| the PRFAQ/6-pager methodology. Much to the surprise of
| people in CDO I asked for advice.
| godelski wrote:
| I think this is an important distinction and the answer is that
| it is hard to distinguish. People often bring up the _Simple
| Sabotage Field Manual_ in situations like these and I think
| there 's something that is often missed: the reason the
| techniques in here are effective is because they are difficult
| to differentiate from normal behavior. This creates plausible
| deniability for the saboteur. Acting too hastily could mean
| losing someone valuable for a genuine mistake. I'm saying I
| agree with the Amazon example. (You can also use saboteurs to
| your advantage if you recognize that they are hunting down and
| exploiting inefficiencies, but that's a whole other
| conversation)
|
| But my understanding of this case is that the actions do not
| appear like simple easy to make mistakes. As I understand, the
| claim was that the intern was modifying the weights of
| checkpoints for other peoples' training results in an effort to
| make their own work better. Mucking about in a checkpoint is
| not a very common thing to do, so should make someone
| suspicious in the first place. On top of this it appears he was
| exploiting weaknesses and injecting code to mess with peoples'
| optimizers, and to do things that do not have a reasonable
| explanation for.
|
| So as far as I can tell, not only was he touching files he
| shouldn't have been touching (and yes, shouldn't have had
| access to), he was taking steps to bypass the blocks there were
| in place and was messing with them in ways that are very
| difficult to explain away with "I thought this might be a good
| idea." (Things that explicitly look like a bad idea). If that
| is what in fact happened, I think it is not a reach to claim
| intentional sabotage. Because if it wasn't, then the actions
| are represent such a level of incompetence that they are a huge
| liability to anyone within reach.
|
| [0]
| https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/...
| Aurornis wrote:
| > If the intern "had no experience with the AI lab", is it the
| right thing to do to fire them, instead of admitting that there
| is a security/access fault internally?
|
| This wasn't an accident, though. The intern had malicious
| intent and was intentionally trying to undermine other people's
| work.
|
| This isn't a case where blameless post-mortems apply. When
| someone is deliberately sabotaging other people's work, they
| must be evicted from the company.
| dankle wrote:
| What a non-story.
| tmalsburg2 wrote:
| But AI!
| HuangYuSan wrote:
| AND China!
| xvector wrote:
| This guy maliciously interfered with ByteDance's LLM project.
| That is huge news. Millions or billions of dollars down the
| drain.
| sokoloff wrote:
| > That is huge news - billions down the drain.
|
| Billions of what? milli-dollars? Bytedance denies the damages
| are over $10M.
| solenoid0937 wrote:
| Of course they will deny it, they have investors... Read
| the posts from the engineers - 30 people's research and
| large model training coming to a grinding halt for a
| quarter. That's easily worth billions in today's market,
| can you imagine if OpenAI or Google didn't report any
| progress on a major model for a quarter?
| needaname wrote:
| It was a phd student that was mad about compensation or something
| purposely injecting malicious code.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I feel less informed after reading the article than I did after
| reading the headline.
| ratedgene wrote:
| yes, the article has nothing about what they were doing or how
| they "interfered" exactly.
| rollulus wrote:
| This article merely relays what ByteDance says, so it's nothing
| but PR, unrelated to journalism. No idea what it's doing on
| bbc.com.
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| Not really. It says:
|
| > ByteDance also denied reports that the incident caused more
| than $10m of damage
|
| It makes clear what ByteDance's official position is, while
| pretty clearly hinting that it might not be true.
| radu_floricica wrote:
| "maliciously interfering" does a lot of the lifting here. And if
| true, I hope that they didn't stop at firing him. Play stupid
| games, win stupid prizes. I hate the kind of entitlement that
| makes people feel justified to destroy huge amounts of value.
| aimazon wrote:
| The context is here:
| https://github.com/JusticeFighterDance/JusticeFighter110
| yapyap wrote:
| whats this mean for us non chinese folk
| xvector wrote:
| 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.
| theginger wrote:
| Hanlon's razor comes to mind
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
| xvector wrote:
| No. This isn't a Hanlon's Razor scenario.
|
| If you look at what he did it was definitely 100%
| actively malicious. For instance, his attack only
| executes when running on >256 GPUs. He inserted random
| sleeps to slow down training time and was knowledgeable
| enough to understand how to break various aspects of the
| loss function.
|
| He then sat in meetings and adjusted his attacks when
| people were getting close to solving the problem.
| ninjin wrote:
| Certainly looks malicious, but what on earth would be his
| motive? He is an MSc student for heaven's sake and this
| tarnishes his entire career. Heck, he has published
| _multiple_ first-author, top-tier papers (two at NeurIPS
| and one at ICLR) and is on par with a mid-stage PhD
| student that would be considered to be doing
| outstandingly well. The guy would (is?) likely to be on
| track for a great job and career. Not saying he did not
| do what was claimed, but I am unsure about any motive
| that fits other than "watching the world burn".
|
| Also, what kind of outfit is ByteDance if an _intern_ can
| modify (and _attack_ ) runs that are on the scale of 256
| GPUs or more? We are talking _at least_ ~USD 8,000,000 in
| terms of the hardware cost to support that kind of job
| and you give access to any schmuck? Do you not have
| source control or _some_ sort of logging in place?
| rfoo wrote:
| > but what on earth would be his motive
|
| Rumors said that his motivation would be to just actively
| sabotage colleague's work because managers decided to
| give priority on GPU resources to those who were working
| on DiT models, and he works on autoregressive image
| generation. I don't know what exactly was his idea, maybe
| he thought that by destroying internal competitors' work
| he can get his GPU quotas back?
|
| > Also, what kind of outfit is ByteDance if an intern can
| modify (and attack) runs that are on the scale of 256
| GPUs or more?
|
| Very high. These research labs are basically run on
| interns (not by interns, but a lot of ideas come from
| interns, a lot of experiments executed by interns), and I
| actually mean it.
|
| > Do you not have source control or some sort of logging
| in place?
|
| Again, rumors said that he gained access to prod jobs by
| inserting RCE exploits (on unsafe pickle, yay, in 2024!)
| to foundation model checkpoints.
| ninjin wrote:
| Thanks, that is at least plausible (but _utterly_ stupid
| if true) and tells me why I would not be a good cop.
| Holding off further judgement on the individuals involved
| until we have more details.
|
| I do understand that interns (who are MSc and PhD
| students) are incredibly valuable as they drive progress
| in my own world too: academia. But my point was not so
| much about _access_ to the resources, as the fact that
| apparently they were able to manipulate data, code, and
| jobs from a _different_ group. Looking forward to future
| details. Maybe we have a mastermind cracker on our hand?
| But, my bet is rather on _awful_ security and
| infrastructure practices on the part of ByteDance for a
| cluster that _allegedly_ is in the range of ~USD
| 250,000,000.
| rfoo wrote:
| Agree on this being stupid.
|
| > my bet is rather on awful security and infrastructure
| practices
|
| For sure. As far as I know ByteDance does not have an
| established culture of always building secure systems.
|
| You don't need to be a mastermind cracker. I've
| used/built several systems for research computing and the
| defaults are always... less than ideal. Without a beefier
| budget and a lot of luck (cause you need the right
| people) it's hard to have a secure system while
| maintaining a friendly, open atmosphere. Which, as you
| know, is critical to a research lab.
|
| Also,
|
| > from a different group
|
| Sounds like it was more like a different sub-team of the
| same group.
|
| From what I heard I'd also argue that this could be told
| as a weak supply chain attack story. Like, if someone you
| know from your school re-trained a CLIP with private
| data, would you really think twice and say "safetensors
| or I'm not going to use it"?
| runeblaze wrote:
| A lot of ML outfits are equipped with ML experts and
| people who care about chasing results fast. Security in
| too many senses of the word is usually an afterthought.
|
| Also sort of as you also hinted, you can't exactly lump
| these top-conference scoring PhD student-equivalents with
| typical "interns". Many are extremely capable. ByteDance
| wants to leverage their capabilities, and likely wants to
| leverage them fast.
| ninjin wrote:
| Basic user separation is not asking much though, or are
| we expected to believe that at ByteDance _everyone_ has a
| wheel bit at a cluster worth many _many_ millions? Let us
| see what turns up. Maybe they had a directory with Python
| pickles that were writeable by _everyone_? But even that
| is silly on a very basic level. As I said in another
| comment, I could be wrong and we have a mastermind
| cracker of an intern. But I somewhat doubt it.
| xvector wrote:
| That level of security is true for most big tech
| companies :) You mistake thinking that large and well
| funded = secure. They clearly have an audit trail but no
| preventative controls, which is sadly the standard for
| move fast environments in big tech.
| runeblaze wrote:
| I think we are converging at an opinion. Internal actors
| can be hard to detect, and honestly there is a reason at
| places like Google interns are treated with heightened
| security checks (my guess -- they learned to do so after
| some years).
|
| Btw one of the rumors has that it is even difficult to
| hire engineers to do training/optimization infra at one
| of those ML shops -- all they want to hire are pure
| researcher types. We can imagine how hard it will be to
| ask for resources to tighten up security (without one of
| these incidents).
| 93po wrote:
| this is closer to occam's since i think the most likely
| scenario here is malicious reputation damage - it's more
| likely someone has it out for this intern rather than
| this intern actually having done literally anything he's
| accused of
| yapyap wrote:
| > Its commercial online operations, including its large language
| AI models, were unaffected by the intern's actions, the company
| added.
|
| so did something actually happen or did they just post some
| inaccuracies on social media
| sss111 wrote:
| Sounds like Tian Keyu stumbled on something he wasn't supposed to
| see -- now they're trying to bury him alive.
| Sabinus wrote:
| If that was the case the State would already have arrested him.
| treksis wrote:
| This is more or less issue of team lead. Just assigned wrong task
| to intern.
| lysace wrote:
| I find it weird that China has a very tight information control
| _and_ simultaneously over and over again has the weirdest
| "netizen" rumors that go mainstream.
|
| What's the explanation? That they are explicitly allowed for some
| strategical reason? Something else?
|
| Edit: @dang: Sorry in advance. I do feel like we got some pretty
| good discussion around this explosive topic, at least in its
| first hour.
|
| Folks, keep up the good behavior -- it makes me look good.
| nuz wrote:
| One idea is that they're fake planted rumors. Certanily not the
| first time things like that happen
| lysace wrote:
| If people get to read shocking rumors, they don't feel that
| their information access is so censored, after all? I could
| see that at least partially working.
|
| "It's just some dangerous information that is censored."
| okasaki wrote:
| Well that's what the Washington regime and its media
| lackies do anyway, "according to a confidential source at
| the Whitehouse..."
| erulabs wrote:
| My explanation is that their tight control is an illusion. Not
| to get political, but the illusion of power _is_ power, and
| suggesting they control billions of peoples speech is certainly
| an illusion of power.
|
| China, and all other (supposedly) top-down-economies, survive
| only because their control is _not_ airtight. If they were to
| actually have complete control, things would fall apart
| rapidly. "No one knows how Paris is fed" and all that.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Ian Malcolm said it best:
|
| "the kind of control you're attempting simply is... it's not
| possible. If there is one thing the history of evolution has
| taught us it's that life will not be contained."
|
| Humans are clever and typically find workarounds given enough
| time/hope. Sure you could argue that this is some kind of
| authoritarian 4D chess/matrix scenario to let off steam for
| an unruly populace, or it's just the natural course of
| things.
| lysace wrote:
| From my work visits and sort of guarded discussions with
| people there: I feel like they have just accepted the
| inevitable. Don't ask weird questions about things you're not
| supposed to ask about, be pragmatic, get things gone, get
| rich.
| erulabs wrote:
| My experience as well! Pragmatism over idealism is a
| fantastic virtue for everyone -- but turns out a _vital_
| one for communists :P
| Liquix wrote:
| Is pragmatism really a "fantastic virtue" when people are
| forced away from alternatives by an overbearing
| government?
| throwaway19972 wrote:
| Is there any culture on earth that prioritizes idealism
| over "pragmatism", if we must use that term? What does
| this even look like?
| whythre wrote:
| There are individuals and subcultures that prioritize
| idealism, yes. Often they are young people. Idealistic
| individuals can get ground down and turned into
| pragmatists, but some hold onto their hopes and dreams
| very tightly.
| erulabs wrote:
| I mean, one could argue that the early Soviet Union
| suffered from this issue. Or early revolutionary China.
| Cambodia is certainly an example. The french revolution
| might be an even better example, what with wanting to re-
| do the clock and calendar and such. To convert startup
| culture speak's "pragmatism beats idealism" into
| political science speak, it might come out as
| "rationalism has tremendous difficultly reinventing all
| unconscious behavior".
| blaufuchs wrote:
| I wasn't aware that Chinese citizens owned the means of
| production ;) just looks like another authoritarian
| dictatorship to me.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| One could argue that the only system under which a
| citizen can own the means of production is capitalism. If
| you "own" something you can sell it, trade it, and
| otherwise use it as you wish. In any realistic version of
| communism these powers are transferred to a central
| authority instead.
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| Guess they never really tried it.
| lysace wrote:
| Wow, even mentioning communists made you get downvoted.
| That's sad.
| erulabs wrote:
| And I was being cheeky too! Such is life.
| airstrike wrote:
| _There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. I
| know this already. Alone, unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the
| enemy._
|
| _Remember this: freedom is a pure idea. It occurs
| spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of
| insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy.
| There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that
| they've already enlisted in the cause._
|
| _Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere.
| And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines
| forward._
|
| _And remember this: the Imperial need for control is so
| desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires
| constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle.
| Oppression is the mask of fear._
|
| _Remember that. And know this, the day will come when all
| these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance will
| have flooded the banks of the Empires's authority and then
| there will be one too many. One single thing will break the
| siege._
|
| _Remember this: try._
| amelius wrote:
| Fake it till you make it. At some point they will have full
| control.
| lysace wrote:
| Yes. LLM:s will make it easy. Even current solutions are
| probably good enough for them to do what what want, with an
| "acceptable" error margin.
| caycep wrote:
| Culturally, the Chinese population has more of a rebellious
| streak than people realize. It's a weird contrast - the Great
| Firewall is there but citizens and often the workers that
| maintain the firewall seem to circumvent it on a regular
| basis. Often in order just to function day to day and
| survive, as noted above.
|
| Also an analogy re how the image is of communist central
| planning, but post Deng, it's maybe even more of a
| freewheeling capitalist economy in some regions than the
| US....(especially in Shenzhen - see Bunnie Huang's write-ups
| of the ecosystem/economies there)
| John23832 wrote:
| There's the Chinese saying, "Heaven is high, and the emperor
| is far away".
| Maxamillion96 wrote:
| China isn't really that centralized and Zhongnanhai has less
| control than the White House does. Local party bosses are
| basically little kings and the average Chinese citizen sees
| less of the government than the average American does, ie one
| of the factors of the Chinese illegal immigration surge last
| year was that China basically has zero social support for
| pensioners or people who lost their businesses in lockdown
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-08-14/china-...
| taurath wrote:
| The thing that stuck out to me the most in the west were the
| long string of articles about the social credit system & the
| fear around the surveillance state. The surveillance state is
| probably about the same level as the UK, and the social
| credit system doesn't run anyone's lives like its described.
| torginus wrote:
| I've heard somewhere that the social credit system is
| really misrepresented in the West - it's designed to track
| financial scammers and people who set up fraudulent
| companies. It's meant to weed out untrustworthy business
| partners, just like how the Western credit system is
| designed to weed out untrustworthy bankers. (Weird how the
| only 'group' in the West who gets implicit protection
| against scams are the banks)
|
| It doesn't really concern the everyman on the street.
|
| The few high profile cases where it was used to punish
| individuals who ran afoul of some politically powerful
| person or caused some huge outrage are red herrings - if
| the system didn't exist, theyd've found some other way to
| punish them.
| taurath wrote:
| The articles functionally stated that you couldn't get an
| apartment, or pay for a hotel room if you were caught
| jaywalking or walking around with a scowl on your face.
| torginus wrote:
| Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. Pretty sure that's
| not true.
| kwillets wrote:
| Conspiracy theories are common in repressive regimes.
| lysace wrote:
| But it's relatively easy for China/CPC to squash them if they
| really want to. Western media is even reporting on changes in
| particular keyword censorship.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| Tight information control means that rumors are often the best
| source of information so people are more engaged in the rumor
| mill. Same thing happened in the Soviet Union.
| cwkoss wrote:
| The house just passed $1.6B spending bill for the production of
| anti-china propaganda. This isn't necessarily a result of that,
| but I'd imagine some of the weird rumors you hear are
| manufactured by US intelligence/state dept.
| testernews wrote:
| source?
| slater wrote:
| Looks like it might be this?
|
| https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-
| bill/1157
| bloomingkales wrote:
| What in god's name are you talking about?
|
| https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-
| bill/1157...
|
| Oh. Had to look it up.
|
| _(6) to expose misinformation and disinformation of the
| Chinese Communist Party's or the Government of the People's
| Republic of China's propaganda, including through programs
| carried out by the Global Engagement Center; and
|
| (7) to counter efforts by the Chinese Communist Party or the
| Government of the People's Republic of China to legitimize or
| promote authoritarian ideology and governance models. _
|
| -----
|
| Feels like the defense sector is determined to make China a
| perpetual enemy.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| It's a real drag. We need to step up competence, not fight
| a war. Viewing China as an enemy vs a strategic competitor
| leads to bad policy. Like it is killing ASML right now...
| jabbany wrote:
| I'd say China doesn't have particularly tight_er_ information
| control than other places, they're using the same tools
| everyone else is using (keyword/hashtag bans, algorithmic
| content demotion, "shadowbans" of responses, and outright
| content removal etc.)...
|
| It's mainly just that there's more politically motivated
| manipulation... versus in the west where those tools would be
| used on things like copyright infringement, pornography, and
| misinformation etc.
| lowkey_ wrote:
| I've spoken extensively about this with people from China.
|
| If something is totally forbidden, that holds.
|
| However, the government doesn't want people to feel oppressed
| beyond the explicitly forbidden.
|
| What happens instead is, if it's unfavorable but not forbidden,
| it will be mysteriously downvoted and removed, but if it keeps
| bubbling up, the government says "okay clearly this is
| important to people" and leaves it up.
|
| This happened with some news cases of forced marriage in some
| rural mountain regions, and the revelation that a popular
| WeChat person (like YouTuber) was involved with one of the
| families.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| China does have a tight information control but it may not be
| what you think it is.
|
| All communication software (QQ/Wechat are the two most used)
| have sort of backend scanner that detects topics that are in
| the "in-season" blacklist and ban accounts accordingly. No one
| knows what the list is so people could get banned for random
| reasons, but in general bashing current policies or calling out
| names of the standing members of Politburo is the quickest way
| to get banned -- and in many instances also got the Wechat
| group banned.
|
| On the other side, surprisingly, there are many contents that
| are apparently inappropriate floating on the social media
| without getting banned. This also throws people off feet.
|
| What I gathered is:
|
| - Don't shit on current party leaders. Actually don't discuss
| _current_ politics at all. AIs don 't always recognize contents
| correctly so you could be banned for supporting one side or
| desisting it at the same time.
|
| - Don't ever try to call up other people to join whatever an
| unofficial cause, whatever it is. Like, even if it's purely
| patriotic, just don't do it. You do it and you might go to
| prison very quickly -- at least someone is going to call you to
| STFU. Grassroot movements is the No.1 enemy of the government
| and they don't like it. You have to go through official
| channels for those.
|
| This leads to the following conclusion:
|
| Essentially, the government wants as much control as possible.
| You want to be patriotic? Sure, but it has to be controlled
| patriotic. You can attend party gathering to show your
| patriotism, but creating your own, unofficial gathering is a
| big No. They probably won't put you into a prison if the cause
| is legit, but police are going to bug you from time to time ->
|
| IMO this is how the CCP succeed. It has successfully switched
| from an ideologic party to an "All-people" party. It doesn't
| really care about ideology. But it wants to assimilate everyone
| who potentially can be out of control. If you are a successful
| businessman, it will invite you to participate in political
| life. If you are an activist who can call up thousands of
| people, it wants you in. It is essentially, a cauldron of
| elitists. It has nothing to do with "Communism". It is
| essentially, GOP + DEM in the US.
| lysace wrote:
| Thanks. I felt like things must have progressed from my last
| sort of insider view from 12 years ago when my company's
| China subsidiary received weekly meetings from officials to
| discuss things that needed to be addressed.
|
| "Item number 12. We feel like this URL is hurtful to the
| Chinese people"
| markus_zhang wrote:
| You are welcome. I probably don't know the full picture
| though, but I think the biggest difference between now()
| and now() - 12 YEAR is that digital surveillance is way
| more advanced. Other than that, I don't think the logic
| changes. CCP has been learning from USSR's experience and
| successfully converted itself away from an ideological
| party many years ago. It started around the early 90s and
| took about a couple of decades for it to happen.
| krisoft wrote:
| I turn the question back at you: why do you think it would be
| in the interest of the Chinese state to surpress this
| particular rummour?
|
| I don't see any implication of this news which would undermine
| their society, or cause disruption, or make people riot. If
| anything it is a tepid warm "do your job correctly and don't be
| too clever by half or else..." story.
|
| Why would they flex their muscles for this one?
| taikobo wrote:
| As someone who have lived most of his life in China, I can give
| you some perspective.
|
| 1. There is no such thing as a single entity of government, CCP
| is not a person, each individual member of the party and
| government has his/her own agenda. Each level of government has
| its own goals. But ultimately it's about gaining control and
| privileges.
|
| 2. It is impossible to control 1.3-1.4 billion people all the
| time, so you make compromises.
|
| 3. The main point is: the tight control is both for and rooted
| from hierarchical power. To put it plainly, anything goes if it
| doesn't undercut CCP's control. OSHA? WTF is that lol. Law? "If
| you talk to me about law, I laugh in your face" says the head
| of a municipal "Rule of Law Office". "Don't talk to me about
| law this and law that", says the court. But the moment you
| order a picture of Winnie the pooh carrying wheat (Xi once said
| he carries 100kg of wheat on his single shoulder) on Alibaba,
| your account gets banned.
|
| Off topic thoughts: Because CCP has total control, there is no
| split of power to speak of, so once they are right, they are so
| right; but when they are wrong, it is catastrophically wrong
| and there is no change of course. It's why you see 30-50
| million people starve to death and an economy miracle within
| the same half century.
| lysace wrote:
| I wish I could upvote your comment more than by +1. Thanks.
| dehugger wrote:
| Both can be true in a country with over 1 billion citizens,
| through shear volume of individuals talented/determined enough
| to bypass information control.
| knowitnone wrote:
| Call me paranoid..."paranoid." but this could be a good way for
| ByteDance to redirect blame to others when they do something in
| the future that people don't like. "It was a rouge employee and
| we fired them"
| londons_explore wrote:
| Seems like the kind of thing that will work once only...
| stuckkeys wrote:
| So far that we know off haha. It could happen anywhere.
| Maliscious content is a thing.
| CaptainNegative wrote:
| no need to be colorist
| e40 wrote:
| It had on the right letters, tho.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| Perhaps the rouge employee was red-teaming.
| disqard wrote:
| I had the same thought! Perhaps we're on the same
| wavelength...
| smcin wrote:
| Very Sarah Palin
| robofanatic wrote:
| I assume he is not the only one responsible because its hard to
| believe interns code wasn't reviewed before releasing.
| dragonelite wrote:
| the infamous "looks good to me" PR review.
| kazinator wrote:
| OTOH: ByteDance intern responsible for spamming your web server
| with crawlers that ignore robots.txt given permanent position
| with a raise, now in management.
| 123yawaworht456 wrote:
| honoring robots.txt is an informal courtesy, not international
| law.
| davemp wrote:
| Not breaking the law is just about the lowest bar you can set
| for an organization.
| not_a_bot_4sho wrote:
| We can go lower
| hnfong wrote:
| FYI, we're still not sure whether the scraped AI training
| datasets involve copyright infringement.
| wyldberry wrote:
| What we often think of as Insider Threat in the west is just
| another Tuesday in Chinese business. I have many experiences of
| this in the video game industry. This industry sabotage and theft
| is a very real part of getting ahead, even amongst companies that
| are owned by the same parent company (ex: studios owned in part
| by Tencent).
| quinttttle wrote:
| for every gifted, motivated, positive, constructive person in
| the world, there are probably 100,000 that want to tear them
| down and eat the carcass.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| No there's not. This is what narcissistic assholes tell
| themselves when someone calls them out for being a
| narcissistic asshole.
| roywiggins wrote:
| 10,000 people is as many people as some entire towns, I don't
| think society would hold together very long if it were true.
|
| 100,000 supposes that there are... hmm... about eighty
| thousand non-evil people in the world, and (odds are) exactly
| none of them are Marshallese and about 2 are Samoan, to give
| a sense of how silly this is.
| Log_out_ wrote:
| It doesn't . But usually that third of the population is
| busy going for each others throat and ignoring the "fools"
| while then taking the coins that mysteriously spawn near
| those as psychopath price mobey.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| Oh, so for every 2 good people there's actually 1 bad
| person. That's a _very_ different ratio.
| Clent wrote:
| I think you are assuming there are a unique 10,000 people
| for each gifted individual. I think it safe to say there is
| overlap and that those 10,000 people are each going after
| several gifted people.
|
| You also appear to be assuming there are no mid range
| people who everyone ignores, that is going to be the
| majority of the population.
| ozim wrote:
| But those people don't have to be evil all the time.
|
| Society holds well if someone steals a candy from the shop.
|
| Those people can become shitty and despicable for that one
| person they envy and can be great for their friends and
| family all the other time.
| cjsawyer wrote:
| I believe the opposite. The issue is that destroying requires
| much less effort than creating.
| cutemonster wrote:
| You can have both at the same time: Say, 15 who want to
| help them, and 5 who would want to hurt them. And then you
| can be right both of you. Although the angry ones would be
| harder to see (sychopants)
| ozim wrote:
| Even better imagine people don't have to be mean/awful
| all the time. They can be shitty for a coworker and then
| be great for friends and family or be great for people at
| other job.
|
| There are really evil people that might be shit all the
| time but society is rather good at spotting them.
| zxexz wrote:
| The world does not work like that. Sure, for every person,
| there may be 100_000 that do not share their ideals. But even
| 10/100_000 would seem ridiculously high as a percentage of
| people who _actively_ try to destroy and cannibalize the work
| of others to showcase their own. Another commenter said it
| here - it 's easier to destroy than create. I guess by my
| vibe-based estimates, it's at least 1_000 times easier to
| destroy than create, in aggregate.
| simplify wrote:
| Only in low-trust societies. Modern, higher-trust society can
| only function because this _isn 't_ true.
| smaudet wrote:
| There is probably a high percentage of tearing down, I doubt
| its so extreme.
|
| I think maybe 1 in 100k is actually anything special, but
| odds are you aren't special, you just noticed that 20% of the
| population is as gifted/motivated/constructive as you are
| (statistically speaking, assuming a bell curve).
|
| And of _those_ , yes, some small percentage will still feel
| "special" and affronted that other people have the same
| ideas/goals/desires as them.
|
| It's a rat race and it's not your fault.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Case in point: Elon Musk. I'm amazed at the quantity and
| vehemence directed at him in this forum. But I suppose it's
| just human nature.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Yet oddly enough, the vitriol didn't turn up against him
| when he was creating awesome stuff, but when he was
| creating awesome stuff _and behaving like a monstrous
| asshole_. Curious!
|
| (There are plenty of people bandwagonning on Musk hate, and
| definitely some for his political bent, but there are also
| plenty of totally valid and non-political reasons to have
| disdain for him)
| Dalewyn wrote:
| I remember plenty of naysayers claiming that Musk was
| going to go broke with Tesla and SpaceX, driven more by
| vitriol than fiscal arguments. Astronomers (and only
| astronomers) also hate Starlink.
|
| I'm going to agree with Walter that it's just human
| nature to want to drag down the successful. Envy is one
| of the seven deadly sins, after all.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| That's why you see everyone losing their goddamn minds
| over Warren Buffet. They just can't stand to see success.
| Jensen Huang. Michael Dell. John Mars. Alain Wertheimer.
| Phil Knight. Dustin Moskovitz.
|
| People literally just trawl the most-successful-people
| list and find folks to hate. Simple as.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| Mark Cuban is an interesting in-between case. But yes,
| you have shown that wealth doesn't do it; but wealth and
| an appetite for publicity (especially for wealth-related
| attributes) seems a solid predictor.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Part of that correlation is because one of the best ways
| to get publicity, as Musk has discovered, is to be a
| monstrous asshole.
|
| Of course you can also get it for philanthropic acts, but
| Musk doesn't, again because he's an asshole.
| loudmax wrote:
| Pride is also one of the deadly sins.
| WalterBright wrote:
| If anyone has a justification for being proud of his
| accomplishments, it's Musk.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > monstrous asshole
|
| You confirmed my point.
|
| He's also routinely attacked for his business success,
| with "you didn't built that", it was all enabled by
| government subsidy, that he knows nothing about
| engineering, that he didn't invent anything, NASA did it
| all first, he took the electric car design from the true
| founders of Tesla, he did it all with someone else's
| money, he lucked into all of it, it's his daddy's money,
| he's a fraud, a con-man, a charlatan, leaves a trail of
| human wreckage, and on and on.
|
| And yet, even his much ridiculed Boring Company is now
| making a nice profit!
| WalterBright wrote:
| I'm curious. In your opinion, what makes him a "monstrous
| asshole"?
| flohofwoe wrote:
| And it doesn't stop at sabotage or theft ;)
|
| https://www.cbsnews.com/news/xu-yao-death-sentence-poisoning...
| thorncorona wrote:
| that link doesn't really do it justice. this was a vendetta
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| > the intern allegedly "maliciously interfered with the model
| training tasks" for a ByteDance research project
|
| Did the intern post a manifesto or something? What was the point
| of doing this?
| dang wrote:
| Related: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/10/bytedance-
| intern...
|
| (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41906970, but we merged
| that thread hither)
| nl wrote:
| The story that was going around on social media (which I only
| know because Claude refused to translate it sometimes) was that a
| particular developer was modifying weights in other developers
| models and crashing their training runs so that the developers
| own work looked better in comparison.
|
| https://twitter.com/YouJiacheng/status/1847420973580243092
| 00000z wrote:
| lmao wtf
| cushpush wrote:
| how is this any different from starting new projects at
| google and leaving them in a half-baked state because that
| leads to a promotion faster? incentives align behavior
| nl wrote:
| If you really can't see how that is different I don't know
| what to say.
| vab2500 wrote:
| haha
| cushpush wrote:
| "if i can't have agi no one can"
| josephd79 wrote:
| haha
| gradientsrneat wrote:
| How is Claude refusing to translate it significant? Ex: did it
| help you find the post?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Early in my career, one of the senior engineers in my group had a
| T-shirt that read: Old Age and Treachery Beats
| Youth and Enthusiasm, Every Time.
|
| Looks like this guy tried the "treachery" part, before he had the
| "old age" part down.
| ugh123 wrote:
| Does the "old age" part give the ability to better cover
| tracks?
| Dalewyn wrote:
| For better or worse, when you have more time to learn how the
| real world works and make the right connections with the
| right people, you get much more leeway in what you can get
| away with.
|
| Naturally, older people had more time to do that than younger
| people. This is why most young people get their shins blasted
| while older people just get a slap on the wrist, if they're
| found out.
| dspillett wrote:
| It can give you the experience to know how careful you need
| to be in doing that, if only because you've lived long enough
| to see many be scuppered because of their failure to do so
| well enough.
| datavirtue wrote:
| You don't leave tracks.
| DrillShopper wrote:
| No but it typically gives seniority in the organization which
| means more credibility which can foreclose anyone looking too
| carefully.
| lopkeny12ko wrote:
| I have read the original article as well as many pieces of
| additional context posted in this thread and yet still don't
| understand what is going on here.
|
| Yes, the intern was actively behaving maliciously, but _why_?
| What did he stand to gain from breaking another team 's training
| code? I don't buy that he went through all that effort and
| espionage simply to make his own work look better. An intern is
| only employed for 3 months, surely sabotaging another team's
| multi-year project is not the most efficient way to make your toy
| 3-month project look better in comparison.
| arthurcolle wrote:
| total lack of intellectual and scientific integrity. maybe US
| asset?
| 00000z wrote:
| this is some CIA/FBI operations type of shit
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