Stanford Students Apologize After Being Accused of Copying Chinese AI Model

By Du Zhihang, Zhou Ziyun, Michael Bellart and Ding Yi

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A view of the campus of Stanford University in California. Photo: VCG

Two Stanford University students have apologized to a Tsinghua University-linked artificial intelligence (AI) startup after being accused online of plagiarizing parts of one of the Chinese company’s AI models, called MiniCPM-Llama3-V2.5.

“We want to apologize to the original authors of MiniCPM” for not doing full due diligence, the computer science students, Siddharth Sharma and Aksh Garg, wrote on X on Tuesday.

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Two Stanford students, Siddharth Sharma and Aksh Garg, apologized to the Tsinghua University-linked AI startup for plagiarism allegations involving their MiniCPM-Llama3-V2.5 model.
Their AI model, Llama3-V, was found to have almost identical code and errors as MiniCPM, prompting backlash and accusations.
Garg and Sharma admitted their failure in due diligence, though they stated they only promoted the model, which was coded by Mustafa Aljadery.

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Who’s Who

Beijing ModelBest Intelligent Technology Co. Ltd.: Founded in August 2022, Beijing ModelBest Intelligent Technology Co. Ltd. is an AI startup focused on developing AI models and applications. Most of its founding team members come from a natural language processing lab at Tsinghua University. The company released the MiniCPM-Llama3-V2.5 AI model in May.

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What Happened When

August 2022：: ModelBest was founded, focusing on the development of AI models.

November 2023：: A group of programmers accused an AI firm founded by Kai-Fu Lee of copying the architecture of the Llama AI model developed by Meta Platforms Inc.

May 2024：: ModelBest released their AI model MiniCPM-Llama3-V2.5.

May 29, 2024：: Sharma, Garg, and another student named Mustafa Aljadery released an AI model called 'Llama3-V.'

June 2, 2024：: A GitHub user revealed that Llama3-V had the same model structure and config file as MiniCPM-Llama3-V2.5.

June 3, 2024：: Li Dahai, co-founder and CEO of ModelBest, accused the students' model of being a copy of MiniCPM-Llama3-V2.5 on social media.

June 4, 2024：: Siddharth Sharma and Aksh Garg issued an apology to the original authors of MiniCPM on X.

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