Former ByteDance intern Tian Keyu raises nearly $30 million at a $200 million valuation
According to a Bloomberg report cited by Phoenix Net Technology, former ByteDance intern Tian Keyu has raised nearly $30 million from investors including 5Y Capital and IDG Capital, valuing his company at $200 million after the funding round. The money will go toward a startup that is still operating in stealth mode and aims to compete with AI researchers such as Fei-Fei Li in the field of world models. In 2024, while interning at ByteDance, Tian was accused of interfering with model training by writing and altering code, causing a loss of computing resources, after becoming dissatisfied with how resources were allocated within his team. ByteDance sued for 8 million yuan in damages and said the intern had been dismissed, while also describing online claims that the incident involved “more than 8,000 GPUs and losses of tens of millions of dollars” as a gross exaggeration. A court ordered Tian to pay 500,000 yuan in compensation for breaching his contract and forfeit all of his wages. Tian said he had shut down another intern’s program to free up computing power. He admitted that his actions were inappropriate, but described them as “setting things right on behalf of heaven,” adding that he would have acted more wisely if he could do it over. Tian completed his master’s degree at Peking University last summer and was the first author of one of NeurIPS 2024’s Best Papers. His lab has no name or product yet, and its team of about 10 includes other former ByteDance employees. He said he had built a dictionary containing around 200,000 symbols that humans cannot recognize for processing video, and plans to feed the model 100 million hours of video. He said the technology could cut the cost of generating one second of video by at least an order of magnitude, and that the company plans to showcase it at offline events before releasing the full model in 2027. As of publication, a ByteDance spokesperson had not responded to questions about Tian’s dismissal, while representatives of 5Y Capital and IDG Capital confirmed their investments but declined to comment further.
According to a Bloomberg report cited by Phoenix Net Technology, former ByteDance intern Tian Keyu has raised nearly $30 million from investors including 5Y Capital and IDG Capital, valuing his company at $200 million after the funding round. The money will go toward a startup that is still operating in stealth mode and aims to compete with AI researchers such as Fei-Fei Li in the field of world models. In 2024, while interning at ByteDance, Tian was accused of interfering with model training by writing and altering code, causing a loss of computing resources, after becoming dissatisfied with how resources were allocated within his team. ByteDance sued for 8 million yuan in damages and said the intern had been dismissed, while also describing online claims that the incident involved “more than 8,000 GPUs and losses of tens of millions of dollars” as a gross exaggeration. A court ordered Tian to pay 500,000 yuan in compensation for breaching his contract and forfeit all of his wages. Tian said he had shut down another intern’s program to free up computing power. He admitted that his actions were inappropriate, but described them as “setting things right on behalf of heaven,” adding that he would have acted more wisely if he could do it over. Tian completed his master’s degree at Peking University last summer and was the first author of one of NeurIPS 2024’s Best Papers. His lab has no name or product yet, and its team of about 10 includes other former ByteDance employees. He said he had built a dictionary containing around 200,000 symbols that humans cannot recognize for processing video, and plans to feed the model 100 million hours of video. He said the technology could cut the cost of generating one second of video by at least an order of magnitude, and that the company plans to showcase it at offline events before releasing the full model in 2027. As of publication, a ByteDance spokesperson had not responded to questions about Tian’s dismissal, while representatives of 5Y Capital and IDG Capital confirmed their investments but declined to comment further.