Recently, foreign media reported that Bytedance was using OpenAI technology to develop its own large language model, which violated the OpenAI terms of service. In response, the relevant person in charge of ByteDance stated that when using OpenAI related services, the company emphasizes that it must abide by its terms of use. We are also in contact with OpenAI to clarify possible misunderstandings caused by external reports.
The following is an introduction to ByteDance’s use of OpenAI services:
1. At the beginning of this year, when the technical team first started exploring the large model, some engineers applied GPT's API services to experimental project research on smaller models. This model is only for testing, there is no plan to go online, and it has never been used externally. This practice has been discontinued after the company introduced GPT API call specification checks in April.
2. As early as April this year, the Byte Big Model team had put forward clear internal requirements not to add data generated by the GPT model to the Byte Big Model training data set, and to train the engineering team to abide by the terms of service when using GPT.
In March and September, the company conducted another round of internal inspections and took measures to further ensure that API calls to GPT comply with regulatory requirements. For example, batch sampling tests the similarity between model output results and GPT to prevent data annotators from using GPT privately.
4. In the next few days, we will conduct a comprehensive inspection again to ensure strict compliance with the terms of use of relevant services.