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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

#731

Post by xp84 »

ifwinterco wrote: post #712
hvb2 wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people are in it for the challenge. Someone else's outage? Yeah I'll happily help diagnose it, analysing and figuring out where the issue is can teach you a lot of things. For the record, this was never at night. Late in the evening, sure.

Also sometimes (depending on the company) being seen to visibly chip in fighting fires can win you real credibility that you can put in the bank and then use later when you want to slightly slack off for a bit. So it can actually make logical sense to do it occasionally even from a purely selfish perspective if it's half an hour on a random Tuesday evening and you aren't actually doing anything else important. All de…

This is relatable. Though I’d add that the company can’t be grateful, it’s just a machine. But the colleagues you’re helping out, they absolutely can be grateful, and will sing your praises, leading to positive things happening. In the right type of company.

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

#732

Post by xp84 »

socalgal2 wrote: post #502
throw0101a wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Whenever I leave a company I make sure everything that belongs to the company goes back to them […] At $WORK we have the option of getting a work smartphone or having the company pay for (at portion of) our monthly mobile bill. I chose a work device because I do not want any cross-contamination. (Others chose payment because they did not want the 'hassle' of carrying a second device (and to save some cash).)

Like you I keep them separate. Not just my phone. I don't do anything personal on work devices (don't log into personal email or banks, etc...) But, I believe I'm in the minority. Most of my fellow employees have added corp to their phone. I believe most do personal stuff on their work computer. I get it, it's inconvenient. I've gone to offsites and given don't have corp on my phone I have to pull out my corp laptop…

> I asked, what about porn

I love that you went there directly, that’s hilarious. I would have wondered the same (wouldn’t we all?), but been embarrassed to ask.

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

#733

Post by akamaka »

bel8 wrote: post #633
akamaka wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The $634 million judgement you’re referring to was only for Masimo’s patents, and the other claims they made about trade secret theft were dismissed.

> only for Masimo’s patents. Sorry but there's no such thing as "only patents", these are often what companies live and die for. The handwaving of Apple wrongdoings have no limits.

All of three of these companies are huge $10+ billion corporations who are capable of doing good and bad simultaneously. If you’re happy painting them as black or white, that your choice, but some people are interested in the specific facts of each case.

All I did was quote a fact without any additional comments, and you are the one being dismissive and handwaving it away.

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

#734

Post by throwaway94949 »

Aurornis wrote: post #124
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…

It gets even worse. The person not only kept the laptop and used an exploit to download confidential Apple documents, they bragged about it to a contact who was still working at Apple who was also feeding him information: > Liu allegedly kept an Apple-issued laptop after departing the company and exploited a vulnerability to download dozens of confidential Apple documents while he was working at OpenAI. He also maint…

> This is how you behave when you think you're so much smarter than everyone around you that consequences don't apply to you.

Found out I already had a bank account with €2000 balance in my name. Temptation was high to take over the account and withdraw the cash.

Fortunately didn't touch a dime.

Long story short, my identity got stolen, account was used to collect eBay scam money and cash out from ATMs. I was a suspect and investigated for money laundering and membership to organised crime.

I had to sue the Prosecutor's Office to have them investigate the scammers and confirm my innocence. They initially refused because it was too hard... Italy.

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

#735

Post by inexcf »

Closi wrote: post #579
mhdi_kr99 wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

steam/valve are good guys

I'm not sure on that: 1) Lots of people think they are partly complicit in all the skins trading/gambling that children do, which is basically skirting gambling laws. This has culminated in a current lawsuit in New York which claims they broke gambling laws. 2) They also currently have a large antitrust lawsuit going on, due to them requiring Most Favored Nation pricing while setting a 30% commission fee vs 12% on co…

1) This is a legit point although i don't see Valve as a big problem in that area. They invented lootboxes but refused to be as bad as others who followed them. Today with valve these things are restricted purely to cosmetics.

2) is weak. The 30% rate was set in 2003 when Steam had zero market power and was identical to the rate used by Apple, PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo. Valve later added tiered reductions (25% above $10M, 20% above $50M), bringing the effective average to ~24%. The rate moved downward while the platform added massive infrastructure: free multiplayer matchmaking, cloud saves, Workshop, Proton, anti-cheat, global CDN, refunds, and community tools. The 30% buys far more today than it did two decades ago.

Developers can also generate unlimited(or i think now limited to some ratio of steam sales) Steam keys and sell them anywhere else with Valve taking 0% commission. If valve were extracting monopoly rents, this escape route would not exist.

The actual lawsuit targets the PMFN price parity clause not the commission itself. And on PC, which is an open platform where Epic's 12% store gained roughly 3% share in seven years despite hundreds of millions in investment, the monopoly framing falls apart. That 12% is also based on EPIC using lots of anti-competitor and anti-consumers tactics and using Fortnite money to prop up the store.

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

#736

Post by ryukoposting »

discopicante wrote: post #626
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…

These were long tenured and valued employees at Apple. They likely already had healthy pile of cash and stock. Maybe it was the environment at OpenAI encouraging this behavior. Or, is this a particular set of skills some/all of the individuals mentioned were already well-practiced at? I hope this case goes to court so we can find out.

This is the caricature of Silicon Valley made real. It doesn't matter how much money Liu had, it isn't enough. It will never be enough. The entire culture is fixated on maximizing growth. Whether that's growth of the corporation or growth of one's own wealth. The Reagan-era "greed is good" thing never really died here (among other places).

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

#737

Post by frenchtoast8 »

everfrustrated wrote: post #721
nullbio wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously they are looking at your IP and code. Anthropic trains on your data regardless of you opting out, I know that one for certain. There's no coincidence they "keep your data temporarily despite opting out" - because they wash it in legal loopholes. There is no opt out. These companies WILL steal your business. Only a matter of time before they are sued as well.

>Anthropic trains on your data This is why companies are wanting the AWS hosted models because they trust AWS running of the same models more than the vendors themselves.

Only for Opus etc. For “Fable 5, Mythos 5, and future models on Bedrock with similar or higher capability levels,” your usage data is retained for 30 days and shared with Anthropic which you can’t opt out of.

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

#738

Post by derektank »

Zigurd wrote: post #653
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.

Blame copyright law. AI training is very comparable to compiling an inverted index, which is considered transformational even though you can recover the input documents from an inverted index.

To be maximally charitable, while creating large language models has been ruled to be transformative and thus fair use under current copyright law, Anthropic did separately violate copyright law when procuring copyrighted text from LibGen and Pirate Library Mirror. That being said, I agree with you, creating LLMs from copyrighted material is very clearly not a violation of copyright under the current legal regime, so long as you procure the text legally, be that through web scraping or by purchasing books directly. And it’s annoying that people try to muddy the water on this.

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

#739

Post by semiquaver »

jtfrench wrote: post #339

Until the industry addresses the Original Sin of Generative AI (and the ascendance of Thievery Corporations), we should expect more and more of this. So far, theft has been rewarded. As long as you make enough money, people seem to be okay with ignoring long-lasting impacts of intellectual theft. As long as you become King of the Cannibals, it seems many are happy to remember you as King and not as the Cannibal.

IP infringement is not theft. There’s a whole “you wouldn’t download a car” meme about this.

Intellectual property has always been a made up idea that has been abused for years by big companies far in excess of its societal value. I’m not sad that the force of IP restrictions seems to be weakening, but I am surprised to see so many people in tech that previously were pretty lassez faire on IP to suddenly take it so seriously now that it’s become a useful means to criticize AI companies with.

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

#740

Post by wavemode »

ct0 wrote: post #644
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…

How do we know this wasn't Apple's plan all along? A double agent of sorts isn't a new concept.

Elaborate?
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