[Former ByteDance Intern Allegedly Sued for 8 Million Yuan Starts World Model Venture, Valued at $200 Million] According to monitoring by Beating, Tian Keyu, the first author of the NeurIPS 2024 Best Paper, has reportedly entered the world model startup space. Sources familiar with the matter revealed that the project was incubated and funded by FiveYuan Capital partner Meng Xing, with tens of millions of dollars already raised, valuing the venture at approximately $200 million. Business registration information shows that Tian Keyu has established multiple AI companies in Beijing this year. Beijing Blue Carbon Network Technology Co., Ltd., in which he holds a 60% stake, focuses on AI hardware, intelligent robotics, and artificial intelligence technology development. Another company, Beijing Blue Carbon Network Technology Co., Ltd., has a registered capital of $1.9 million. Tian Keyu previously interned at ByteDance. ByteDance accused him of altering code, attacking team model training tasks, and filed a lawsuit in 2024 seeking 8.02 million yuan in damages. The case has been accepted by the court, but no public ruling has been found yet. Subsequently, Tian Keyu, as the first author, won the NeurIPS 2024 Best Paper award for the VAR image generation framework. VAR employs a "next-scale prediction" approach from coarse to fine, with the paper claiming it surpasses diffusion Transformers in terms of image quality, inference speed, and data efficiency. [Original Link]