ByteDance Refutes Offering $1.4M Annual Salary to Poach OpenAI Talent

It was reported that ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, offered an annual salary of $1.4 million to poach talent of the ChatGPT R&D team from OpenAI. On April 24, a spokesperson for ByteDance responded to the report and stated that it was not true, according to Chinese media outlet The Paper.

ChatGPT is a chatbot launched by OpenAI in November 2022 and is currently one of the hottest topics in the tech industry. Its emergence has sparked a new round of AI “arms race,” with many technology companies around the world announcing their entry into this field. In China, for instance, Alibaba‘s large-scale model product “Tongyi Qianwen” began invitation testing on April 7. Later on April 14, Tencent Cloud released its new generation HCC high-performance computing cluster.

SEE ALSO: ByteDance’s Volcano Engine Releases Large Model Training Cloud Platform

ByteDance has not yet announced its own large-scale model product. According to a report by 36Kr, ByteDance has already laid out plans for large-scale models and is focusing on language and image modalities. A spokesperson for ByteDance later responded that the firm has been exploring these fields but it’s still immature.

On April 18, Volcano Engine, a subsidiary of ByteDance, released a new version of its machine learning platform which supports training models with millions of parameters while maintaining microsecond-level latency networks. It supports elastic computing and can save up to 70% on computing power costs. It is suitable for GPU instances in large-scale distributed parallel training scenarios, and its performance is more than three times higher than the previous generation of instance clusters.

According to a report by Caixin, Tan Dai, President of Volcano Engine, said more than 70% of Chinese enterprises in the field have already been deployed on Volcano Engine cloud services related to large-scale models. He also mentioned that, unlike other cloud vendors who released their own large-scale models, Volcano Engine will provide computing power and technical services to multiple large-scale model companies, similar to the relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI or Amazon and Bedrock.