Former ByteDance Intern Accused of Sabotage Among Winners of Prestigious AI Award

A former ByteDance intern who was allegedly dismissed for professional misconduct, including sabotaging colleagues’ work, was announced as a winner of one of the most prestigious annual awards for AI research this week. Keyu Tian, whose LinkedIn and Google Scholar pages list him as a master’s student in computer science at Peking University, is the first author of one of two papers chosen Tuesday for the main Best Paper Award at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference, the largest gathering of machine-learning researchers in the world. “The overall quality of the paper presentation, experimental validation and insights give compelling reasons to experiment with this model,” the NeurIPS Best Paper Award committee wrote in a statement. “NeurIPS gave best paper award to a super problematic work,” Abeba Birhane, head of the newly formed AI Accountability Lab at Trinity College, wrote on Bluesky. On Bluesky, Birhane and other AI researchers linked to an anonymous GitHub blog post that also circulated on HackerNews, Reddit, and other platforms in recent days urging the academic AI community to reconsider granting the Best Paper honor to Tian because of his “serious misconduct,” which it says “fundamentally undermines the core values of integrity and trust upon which our academic community is built.”