Thanks, that is at least plausible (but utterly stupid if true) and tells me why I would not be a good cop. Holding off further judgement on the individuals involved until we have more details.
I do understand that interns (who are MSc and PhD students) are incredibly valuable as they drive progress in my own world too: academia. But my point was not so much about access to the resources, as the fact that apparently they were able to manipulate data, code, and jobs from a different group. Looking forward to future details. Maybe we have a mastermind cracker on our hand? But, my bet is rather on awful security and infrastructure practices on the part of ByteDance for a cluster that allegedly is in the range of ~USD 250,000,000.
Agree on this being stupid.
> my bet is rather on awful security and infrastructure practices
For sure. As far as I know ByteDance does not have an established culture of always building secure systems.
You don't need to be a mastermind cracker. I've used/built several systems for research computing and the defaults are always... less than ideal. Without a beefier budget and a lot of luck (cause you need the right people) it's hard to have a secure system while maintaining a friendly, open atmosphere. Which, as you know, is critical to a research lab.
Also,
> from a different group
Sounds like it was more like a different sub-team of the same group.
From what I heard I'd also argue that this could be told as a weak supply chain attack story. Like, if someone you know from your school re-trained a CLIP with private data, would you really think twice and say "safetensors or I'm not going to use it"?