Former ByteDance Intern Tian Keyu Raises Nearly $30 Million, Valuation at $200 Million

Former ByteDance intern Tian Keyu has secured nearly $30 million in funding from investors including Wuyuan Capital and IDG Capital, with a post-investment valuation reaching $200 million. The funds will be used for a startup that is currently in stealth mode, aiming to compete in the field of world models against AI researchers such as Fei-Fei Li. During his internship at ByteDance, Tian Keyu expressed dissatisfaction with the team's resource allocation and interfered with model training by writing and altering code, resulting in resource loss. ByteDance sued him for 8 million yuan in damages, and the court ruled that he must pay 500,000 yuan for breaching his contract, confiscating all of his wages. Tian Keyu admitted to inappropriate behavior but claimed it was "to act on behalf of justice." He completed his master's degree at Peking University and is the first author of one of the best papers at NeurIPS 2024. His team, consisting of about 10 people, including other former ByteDance employees, has created a dictionary containing approximately 200,000 symbols that are unrecognizable to humans for processing videos. They plan to input 100 million hours of video into the model, claiming that this technology can reduce the cost of generating one second of video by at least an order of magnitude, with plans to showcase it through offline events before the full model release in 2027.

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