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Nvidia sued for stealing trade secrets: blunder showed rival company's code

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Re: Nvidia sued for stealing trade secrets: blunder showed rival company's code

#161

Post by treprinum »

sircastor wrote: post #149
feelandcoffee wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if this would become more common with things like ChatGPT. Let's say you've been working in place A, you show your code to an LLM service (like the dozen or so Copilot-like services) and tell them to refactor. And for the sake of argument, let's say the LLM uses your code and questions for its next training dataset. A few years pass, then you go to work at Place B, and ask a question that happens to be relat…

For this reason, and a few others, my workplace simply put a blanket ban on these kinds of tools. If our code is never exposed to the learning tool, it’s never in danger of being showing up somewhere else. Incidental to that, I feel like these tools expose the reality behind “copyrighting code/math” and how fallacious it is. If the tool can generate the efficient methods of achieving a result, I think it becomes obvi…

If you use GitHub, you feed OpenAI with your code as training data already, with GitLab you do the same for Google.

Re: Nvidia sued for stealing trade secrets: blunder showed rival company's code

#162

Post by happytiger »

mattnewton wrote: post #145
happytiger wrote: post #139

Tertiary point but one that been on my mind… What’s the difference between one person doing it individually and a company doing it to train an AI? I mean isn’t this exactly what a lot of LLm training data is built on as well? I get there might be different legalities, but morally isn’t it all basically merely degrees of theft? Like this is trade secret theft, but training an AI on the code isn’t? You can download a c…

How is this morally theft anymore than hiring someone who has experience solving the problem to solve the problem again? As long as they aren’t reproducing the solution verbatim it’s already morally acceptable to hire experts for their experience. Why would “hiring” software for its “experience” be different?

Because he copied the source code or at least had it for reference all over the room he was coding in?

Re: Nvidia sued for stealing trade secrets: blunder showed rival company's code

#163

Post by trealira »

redder23 wrote: post #84
redder23 wrote: post #8

And they will get a slap on the wrist at best. They made billions this is just peanuts.

[flagged]

It's not a fact, it's your prediction of the future. I didn't downvote you, but don't act like what you personally think is a fact.

Re: Nvidia sued for stealing trade secrets: blunder showed rival company's code

#164

Post by justrealist »

Blammar wrote: post #131
tremere wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is tremendous upside. You can look like a rockstar at the new company and propel yourself upwards with that momentum.

More like a shooting star once your perfidy is discovered.

You could easily milk it for 4-5 years and then transition into management before you have to pull your own weight as an IC.

Re: Nvidia sued for stealing trade secrets: blunder showed rival company's code

#165

Post by dctoedt »

toast0 wrote: post #105
david-gpu wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point I was told to never ever look at a competitor's patents, because doing so would worsen the penalties if it turned out that our design infringed upon them. Can you confirm that's true? Doesn't that mean that in general it is also a really bad idea to ask an engineer questions about a particular piece of tech that they patented at a previous employer, even though the specific information is a matter of pu…

Willful infringement allows for up to triple damages. The expectation is you can't do willful infringement if you're not aware of competitor's patents, and you can't be aware of them if your policy is to never look at patent documents. Or that's the idea anyway.

> The expectation is you can't do willful infringement if you're not aware of competitor's patents, and you can't be aware of them if your policy is to never look at patent documents. Or that's the idea anyway.

"Willful blindness" can be a danger (according to the Supreme Court, albeit in a different context).

Possibly a bigger danger: Your product gets kicked out of the market by an injunction (a court order to stop making, using, selling, etc.)

Re: Nvidia sued for stealing trade secrets: blunder showed rival company's code

#166

Post by SoftTalker »

criddell wrote: post #93
anon373839 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sure we’ll all be glad one day that Apple shared this research breakthrough: https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/6/16614038/apple-samsung-sl...

A good example of a patent that was challenged in court and wasn’t totally invalidated is Amazon’s 1-click ordering. They patented storing customer shipping and payment details in a database so they could purchase something with a single click. It expired in 2017 but for the period it was in force, Amazon collected millions in licensing fees.

Patents really shouldn't be granted when any competent junior engineer could have designed and implemented the feature. This method is doesn't pass the "nonobvious" test.

Re: Nvidia sued for stealing trade secrets: blunder showed rival company's code

#167

Post by SoftTalker »

winocm wrote: post #31
juunpp wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nvidia did hire him precisely for his previous experience at this rival company, on the very same project that the two companies were partnered on, which is the same project that Nvidia hired him for. Yes, this happens all the time. > There is no argument to be made that Nvidia wasn't aware he'd be coming with secrets. This is not a logical conclusion from the above. Hiring for the exp is fine. Hiring for the trade…

A thought that came to me recently in the shower: Isn't all knowledge effectively based on previous knowledge, and by extension, experience? i.e: A programmer knows how to do X, leaves a company to do Y, where Y is in the same field of work as X. Doesn't X still affect the programmer on a subconscious level and henceforth, their thoughts indirectly?

This is why companies want employees to sign noncompete agreements (in jurisdictions where they are not illegal).

Re: Nvidia sued for stealing trade secrets: blunder showed rival company's code

#168

Post by ekianjo »

sircastor wrote: post #149
feelandcoffee wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if this would become more common with things like ChatGPT. Let's say you've been working in place A, you show your code to an LLM service (like the dozen or so Copilot-like services) and tell them to refactor. And for the sake of argument, let's say the LLM uses your code and questions for its next training dataset. A few years pass, then you go to work at Place B, and ask a question that happens to be relat…

For this reason, and a few others, my workplace simply put a blanket ban on these kinds of tools. If our code is never exposed to the learning tool, it’s never in danger of being showing up somewhere else. Incidental to that, I feel like these tools expose the reality behind “copyrighting code/math” and how fallacious it is. If the tool can generate the efficient methods of achieving a result, I think it becomes obvi…

You can self host LLMs you know

Re: Nvidia sued for stealing trade secrets: blunder showed rival company's code

#169

Post by userbinator »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #41
pritambaral wrote: post #6

TFA makes it sound as if the entirety of the blame can be placed on one employee. Sure, his actions do seem to support that view, but then again, Nvidia did hire him precisely for his previous experience at this rival company, on the very same project that the two companies were partnered on, which is the same project that Nvidia hired him for. There is no argument to be made that Nvidia wasn't aware he'd be coming w…

A problem here is that while the companies will generally make very clear that they don't want you to have any single line of code, any schematic, any drawing, anything at all from your previous company; they may also expect you to bring "experience" from the previous company, thereby pressuring more junior employees into doing exactly that - bringing some docs from the previous company - but not telling about it. Th…

Some people have very, very good memories and can bring all of that in their brain. Does that make it legal or not, just because it's in someone's brain and can be easily regurgigated at will? It's a subtle question.

Re: Nvidia sued for stealing trade secrets: blunder showed rival company's code

#170

Post by teddyh »

pierat wrote: post #111
david-gpu wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point I was told to never ever look at a competitor's patents, because doing so would worsen the penalties if it turned out that our design infringed upon them. Can you confirm that's true? Doesn't that mean that in general it is also a really bad idea to ask an engineer questions about a particular piece of tech that they patented at a previous employer, even though the specific information is a matter of pu…

Just search it in Yandex with a VPN, and in a Tails VM just for paranoid-icity. I did similar for medical self-symptom before ACA prevented "pre-existing condition" scam.

That stuff is exactly what the Tor Browser is for: https://www.torproject.org/download/>. No need for any of that other stuff.
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