A former ByteDance intern who was allegedly dismissed for skilled misconduct, together with sabotaging colleagues’ work, was introduced as a winner of probably the most prestigious annual awards for AI analysis this week. Keyu Tian, whose LinkedIn and Google Scholar pages record him as a grasp’s scholar in laptop science at Peking College, is the primary writer of one in all two papers chosen Tuesday for the primary Greatest Paper Award on the Neural Info Processing Methods (NeurIPS) convention, the most important gathering of machine-learning researchers on the planet.
The paper, titled “Visible Autoregressive Modeling: Scalable Picture Era by way of Subsequent-Scale Prediction,” presents a brand new technique for creating AI-generated pictures that Tian and 4 coauthors—all affiliated with both ByteDance or Peking College—declare is quicker and extra environment friendly than its predecessors. “The general high quality of the paper presentation, experimental validation and insights (scaling legal guidelines) give compelling causes to experiment with this mannequin,” the NeurIPS Greatest Paper Award committee wrote in a statement.
The committee’s choice to grant the consideration to Tian, whom ByteDance reportedly sued for over $1 million in damages final month, claiming deliberate sabotage of different firm analysis initiatives, shortly grew to become the main target of wider discussions on-line about how NeurIPS is run and the way in which prime AI researchers consider the work of their colleagues. The information additionally triggered the small print of a scandal that had been brewing on Chinese language social media for weeks to lastly spill over onto the English-language web.
“NeurIPS gave finest paper award to an excellent problematic work (not first time this has occurred btw),” Abeba Birhane, head of the newly formed AI Accountability Lab at Trinity Faculty, wrote on Bluesky. “You’d suppose a convention that prides itself on upholding the very best scientific & moral normal would [do] due diligence earlier than they offer the award to a paper that immediately contradicts their values.”
A spokesperson for NeurIPS confused that the consideration was given to the paper, to not Tian himself. They directed WIRED to a portion of the award committee’s statement explaining how the convention evaluates paper submissions. “The search committees thought of all accepted NeurIPS papers equally, and made selections independently primarily based on the scientific advantage of the papers, with out making separate concerns on authorship or different components, in step with the NeurIPS blind evaluate course of,” it reads.
On Bluesky, Birhane and different AI researchers linked to an nameless GitHub blog post that additionally circulated on HackerNews, Reddit, and different platforms in current days urging the educational AI neighborhood to rethink granting the Greatest Paper honor to Tian due to his “severe misconduct,” which it says “essentially undermines the core values of integrity and belief upon which our educational neighborhood is constructed.”