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Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets

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Re: Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets

#681

Post by cwillu »

cromka wrote: post #512
general1465 wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They systematically violated copyright when they grabbed whole internet to train their models. Do you really believe that they will stop stealing because they signed some funny ToS? Especially when every bit of data they have and competition does not have is making their model better.

People downvote you like you're being paranoid, but we're literally discussing this in a thread that shows how little respect those companies have for any sort of trade secrets.

I downvoted because the reply has nothing to do with the argument.

If I know for a fact that you're cheating on your wife, and someone else asks how I know that, then a third person chirping about your sketchy business dealings is entirely irrelevant to the question, no matter how much suspicion it might otherwise raise.

Re: Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets

#682

Post by estearum »

latexr wrote: post #678
estearum wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or unethical people are hard to spot, in part due to, you know... their lack of ethics.

> Or unethical people are hard to spot That’s covered by my options: “doesn’t do a good job of filtering”. > due to, you know... their lack of ethics. Being unethical and being able to hide it are entirely orthogonal.

Those are definitely not entirely orthogonal. Especially in business where most unethical behavior starts with or is sustained by deception – which is itself unethical – the two are very much related.

Re: Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets

#683

Post by mayneack »

selfmodruntime wrote: post #613
mayneack wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this will settle before it gets to discovery I bet

Hard to believe when they could use this opportunity to hurt a competitor.

A settlement can be in favor of apple still

Re: Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets

#684

Post by nullbio »

nsagent wrote: post #651
aesthesia wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on the loopholes here?

I'm unwilling to speculate whether or not OpenAI is breaking their agreements (I honestly have no clue), but as an NLP researcher I'm certain they could launder data by having an LLM rewrite it and subsequently train on the rewritten data. Papers like "Curated Synthetic Data Doesn't Have to Collapse" [1] and "How to Synthesize Text Data without Model Collapse?" [2] demonstrate it's possible to do this. Since OpenAI's…

It's exactly what you've said. I'm speaking about Anthropic though, I have no idea whether OpenAI does it.

> Anthropic agrees that Customer (a) retains all rights to its Inputs, and (b) owns its Outputs. Anthropic disclaims any rights it receives to the Customer Content under these Terms. Subject to Customer’s compliance with these Terms, Anthropic hereby assigns to Customer its right, title and interest (if any) in and to Outputs. Anthropic may not train models on Customer Content from Services. “Inputs” means submissions to the Services by Customer or its Users and “Outputs” means responses generated by the Services to Inputs (Inputs and Outputs together are “Customer Content”).

This is the only commercial ToS clause about how they handle your data for subscription users. They only promise not to train the model on your exact input and exact output. There's nothing about not washing your data - the "clean-room" approach, which is obviously easily automatable by a company that specializes in automation. That is not training a model on your data, it is using a model to create derivatives of your data, then training it on "their" derivatives.

People really needs to apply pressure and start demanding answers from these companies regarding this - because it is a huge problem. Historically, the amount of labor required to do something like this would make it entirely unfeasible, so this is all new territory. The existing laws and the requirements around clarity surrounding these conditions do not reflect the technology progress.

Re: Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets

#686

Post by ClumsyPilot »

peyton wrote: post #259
khurs wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's Apple, which is a huge target. Never mind these individuals, you will have China, Russia and other seeking to infiltrate it. In any top r&d area, one wonders if they perhaps should be searching staff on way out and making then sign out and return CAD drawings etc.

You get trustworthy people by trusting people. Generally when I was there there was a presumption of trust. Given how blatantly the defendants are alleged to have acted, that’s still the case.

> You get trustworthy people by trusting people

Huh? Do FBI/CIA/etc run that way?

Re: Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets

#687

Post by sumeno »

ozgung wrote: post #543
joshstrange wrote: post #2

Some pretty damning stuff: > OpenAI also instructs new hires on how to avoid scrutiny when they leave Apple. For example, Mr. Tan warns them not to tell Apple that they have taken jobs at OpenAI, so they can stay at Apple as long as they can. > Apple says it discovered a pattern of OpenAI recruits emailing themselves confidential information when leaving Apple, including Tan. > OpenAI apparently used confidential App…

I think a mandatory first thing for any engineer is to learn, understand and commit for life to the Ethics of their profession. It's a shame all these very picky recruitment processes and 'culture' of these giant companies didn't care about ethics and morality. Relevant articles in IEEE Code of Ethics: 3. to avoid real or perceived conflicts of interest whenever possible, and to disclose them to affected parties when…

> It's a shame all these very picky recruitment processes and 'culture' of these giant companies didn't care about ethics and morality.

Oh, it absolutely does, just not in the direction that's good for society. OpenAI (as one example) didn't become like this by accident, it was intentional. Sam Altman isn't going to hire ethical leadership for his company, they would just get in his way.

Re: Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets

#689

Post by zarzavat »

user43928 wrote: post #602
Barbing wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the smartest people on the planet all in the same room, data at their fingertips… they randomly add it to the training set? Labs at least must study prompts in an airgapped fashion. From there, consider how they could generate synthetic data to train another model. After, require trusted staff to do multiple levels of independent granular reviews of all fruits of the highest-value stolen inputs. (Or for model…

That is an interesting thought. They could run some sort of analysis to find high value input, such as proprietary technology, algorithms, or strategy. Then they could group them together for one specific topic, and produce a report that analyzes if the information is plausible. If so, they can have it send to staff for review, who could then create a test set that rewards the model for going into the direction of th…

It's actually simpler: your code is not the valuable part, it's the telemetry/metadata/conversation surrounding your session that's valuable. Every time you press escape, every time tell Claude/Codex that it's being an idiot, your back-and-forth conversations, etc. "when/why did we fail and how can we improve?" is what they want to know.

They can use LLMs to launder confidential customer sessions into trainable data. Then they can claim that they don't train on "your data" without it being technically incorrect.

Re: Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets

#690

Post by mikeyouse »

xiphias2 wrote: post #593
taurath wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is how you behave when you think you're so much smarter than everyone around you that consequences don't apply to you. Its also how some folks act like when they've done something they morally can't deal with - their subconscious starts throwing all sorts of obvious signs up until they get caught. I presume this was done for a giant pile of cash, stock, and probably a promise that nobody really cares if you sh…

So far it seems that he's winning as OpenAI is being sued, not Liu

Not so.. He’s being sued personally as well. the lawsuit is Apple vs. “ CHANG LIU, TANG YEW TAN, OPENAI FOUNDATION f/k/a OPENAI, INC., OPENAI GROUP PBC, and IO PRODUCTS, LLC f/k/a IO PRODUCTS, INC.”
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