Keyu Ikuta, a top student at Peking University, attracted widespread attention due to a malicious attack incident during his internship at ByteDance. He won the NeurIPS2024 Best Paper Award for the paper he participated in during his internship at ByteDance. However, his academic achievements are in sharp contrast to the malicious behavior carried out during ByteDance. This incident not only exposed individual moral risks, but also triggered a profound reflection on corporate safety protection and intern management, and triggered public discussions on science and technology ethics.
Recently, Tian Keyu once again became the focus due to a malicious attack during his internship at ByteDance. This Peking University intern won the NeurIPS2024 Best Paper Award for the paper he participated in during his internship at Byte, and this paper was the sixth highest-scoring paper in NeurIPS2024. The reversal of this incident shocked netizens.
Tian Keyu's paper won the "Best Paper" award at NeurIPS2024. This is also the second paper in China to win this award this year. In addition, Tian Keyu has published many top conference papers, including the ICLR2023 Spotlight paper "Designing BERT for Convolutional Networks: Sparse and Hierarchical Masked Modeling", as well as the Poster Awards of NeurIPS2021 and 2020. However, compared with his academic achievements, Tian Keyu’s malicious behavior in Byte has attracted more attention.
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A few months ago, Tian Keyu took advantage of Huggingface's vulnerability during his internship at ByteDance and forged a ckpt file containing malicious code. This caused Byte's model training to be tampered with, and the attacker modified the parameters and training direction of the model, causing serious problems in model training. Tian Keyu initially denied being involved in the incident, saying that the attack occurred after he left his job, but media reports showed that ByteDance had sued him in court. In the end, the court ordered Tian Keyu to compensate ByteDance 8 million yuan and publicly apologize.
ByteDance clarified that despite the attack, it only affected research projects and did not affect the company's formal commercialization projects. Byte immediately fired Tian Keyu and handed it over to the school. The company also emphasized that the loss of the team will not affect the development of other businesses.
Tian Keyu's behavior triggered discussions about intern management and corporate technology security. Although he had outstanding academic achievements and high-quality papers, his irrational behavior had a huge negative impact. The incident also drew attention to vulnerabilities in security protection and intern management at large companies. Many industry insiders believe that ByteDance’s technical security and management still need to be strengthened to prevent similar incidents from happening.
The Tian Keyu incident has sounded a wake-up call for the technology industry, reminding us that technical capabilities and ethics are equally important. How to balance academic pursuits and social responsibilities, and how to strengthen corporate security and talent cultivation require further discussion and improvement.