Former ByteDance intern accused of sabotage amongst winners of prestigious AI prize

A former ByteDance intern who was allegedly fired for misconduct, together with sabotaging the work of his colleagues, was introduced this week because the winner of some of the prestigious annual prizes for AI analysis. Keyu Tian, ​​whose LinkedIn and Google Scholar pages record him as a grasp’s pupil in laptop science at Peking College, is the primary creator of one among two papers chosen Tuesday for the principle prize for finest paper on the Neural Data Processing Techniques (NeurIPS) convention, the the largest gathering machine studying researchers around the globe.

THE papertitled “Autoregressive Visible Modeling: Producing Scalable Pictures by way of Up-Scaling Prediction,” presents a brand new methodology for creating AI-generated photos that Tian and 4 co-authors, all affiliated with ByteDance or the Peking College, is quicker and extra environment friendly than the earlier one. predecessors. “The general high quality of the paper presentation, experimental validation, and data (scaling legal guidelines) present compelling causes to experiment with this mannequin,” the NeurIPS Finest Paper Award committee wrote in a press release . statement.

The committee’s resolution to grant this honor to Tian, ​​which ByteDance reportedly continued for greater than $1 million in damages final month, alleging deliberate sabotage of the corporate’s different analysis initiatives, shortly turned the main target of broader discussions on-line about how NeurIPS works and how one can obtain this. AI researchers consider the work of their colleagues. The information additionally brought on particulars of a scandal that had been brewing on Chinese language social media for weeks to lastly unfold throughout the English-speaking web.

“NeurIPS awarded the perfect article prize to extraordinarily problematic work (this isn’t the primary time that this has occurred)”, Abeba Birhane, head of newly formed AI Accountability Lab at Trinity Faculty, wrote on Bluesky. “You’ll suppose {that a} convention that prides itself on upholding the best scientific and moral requirements can be [do] do your due diligence earlier than awarding the prize to an merchandise that immediately contradicts their values.

A NeurIPS spokesperson careworn that this honor was given to the journal and to not Tian himself. They directed WIRED to a few of the award committee members statement explaining how the convention evaluates paper submissions. “The analysis committees equally reviewed all accepted NeurIPS articles and made impartial choices based mostly on the scientific benefit of the articles, with out individually contemplating authorship or different elements, in accordance with the evaluation course of blind from NeurIPS”, we are able to learn.

On Bluesky, Birhane and different AI researchers linked to an nameless GitHub blog post which has additionally been circulating on HackerNews, Reddit and different platforms in latest days, urging the educational AI neighborhood to rethink awarding the perfect paper prize to Tian resulting from his “critical misconduct”, which it stated , “essentially undermines the elemental values ​​of integrity and belief.” on which our college neighborhood is constructed.