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   Tian Keyu's stealth world-model startup raises ~$30M as poisoning allegations resurface

   A Chinese long-form commentary examines the case of Tian Keyu, a former ByteDance intern whom the company fired in August 2024 and later accused of tampering with colleagues' model-training code; ByteDance said in an October 2024 statement that reports of 8,000+ GPUs and tens of millions of dollars in losses were heavily exaggerated. A GitHub page posted the same day as his podcast appearance, signed by five named people including co-first authors of the video project Goku and the first author of LlamaGen, alleged the interference began in March 2024 and included corrupted text-encoder weights, a modified optimizer, altered data shuffling and a shared-storage backdoor; the page also claimed the VAR text-to-image project served PixArt, an open-source model, for daily tests. Tian, who won a NeurIPS best-paper award for VAR, has since raised close to $30 million from 5Y Capital, IDG and others at a roughly $200 million post-money valuation for a still-unnamed world-model company of about ten people; a court reportedly found him in breach of contract and ordered 500,000 yuan in damages.

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