ByteDance Ex-Intern Tian Keyu Raises Nearly $30 Million at $200 Million Valuation

According to Phoenix Tech, citing Bloomberg, Tian Keyu, a former ByteDance intern, has secured nearly $30 million in funding from institutions including 5Y Capital and IDG Capital, at a post-investment valuation of $200 million. The funds will be used for a startup still in stealth mode, competing with AI researchers such as Fei-Fei Li in the world model field. In 2024, during his internship at ByteDance, Tian was accused of interfering with model training by writing and altering code due to dissatisfaction with team resource allocation, causing resource losses. ByteDance sued for 8 million yuan in compensation and stated the intern had been dismissed, while noting that online claims of "involving over 8,000 GPUs and losses exceeding $10 million" were severely exaggerated. The court ruled that Tian compensate 500,000 yuan for breach of contract and forfeited all his wages. Tian said he had shut down another intern's program to free up computing power, admitting improper conduct but describing it as "carrying out justice on behalf of heaven," and said he would take a wiser approach if given a second chance. Tian completed his master's degree at Peking University last summer and is the first author of one of the best papers at NeurIPS 2024. His lab has no name or product yet, with a team of about 10 people, including other former ByteDance employees. He said he has built a dictionary of approximately 200,000 symbols unrecognizable to humans for processing video, and plans to feed 100 million hours of video into the model, claiming the technology could reduce the cost of generating one second of video by at least an order of magnitude, with plans to showcase it at offline events before the full model's release in 2027. As of press time, a ByteDance spokesperson had not responded to the dismissal matter, while representatives of 5Y Capital and IDG Capital confirmed the investment but declined further comment.