Wow, American AI labs are now quite close in ethical competition to their Chinese counterparts heh.
It seems we're truly in a power war rn.
Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets
911–920 of 1001 posts
Re: Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets
#912Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
That's in fact also very technically feasible. They're already running small classifier models on both your inputs and your outputs. These models are said to be in place for safety, but they could answer 2 questions: (1) is this a safe query, and (2) is this query about X, Y, or Z topics (which happen to be high alpha / very interesting to Anthropic).
If #2 returns a yes, the input/output are temporarily stored (say, for 30 days) while a background process cleans up PII and generalizes the prompt to be "clean", then the clean prompt that is not yours anymore is stored aside and used for training, product development, etc.
Re: Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets
#913Re: Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets
#914Earlier quoted context omitted.
> somehow some of my fellow country men/women colleagues took pride in "being available" I call that being exploitable.
Reap what you sow. The one's who follow US "availability culture" absolutely will get promoted faster than the euro-in-american clothing "I work to live not live to work" crowd. Marxian style LTV analysis of the economy breaks down hardcore involving anything touching electrons. His analysis of the theory of alienation/exploitation is literally invalid in the era of computers, and exponentially so in the era of AI sy…
> His analysis of the theory of alienation/exploitation is literally invalid in the era of computers,
What?
Software development is the poster child for alienation, and LLMs turning your job into one where you manage an incredibly productive idiot turned all of that up to 11.
Re: Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets
#915Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was a thread here not too long ago about employees getting fired because they were cheating on their expense accounts. C-level execs cheating on pretty trivial amounts. And others brought up star athletes getting paid millions, then getting busted placing thousands of dollars on insider bets. There's a lot of irrationality in these decisions.
Greed knows no limits. That's how polls showed the happiest people earn around 60-80k a year, and both the people below and above that threshold, reported to be less and less happy the less they made and also the more they made. It's as if the more money you make, the more you need to feel fulfilled, so people start stealing and scamming to cover a self inflicted psychological money deficit.
> That's how polls showed the happiest people earn around 60-80k a year, and both the people below and above that threshold, reported to be less and less happy the less they made and also the more they made.
This is a myth. The original 2010 Kahneman-Deaton study showed that how favorably people judged their overall lives continued to improve beyond $75k. Daily emotional well-being appeared to stop improving around that level. [1]
A larger 2021 study by Killingsworth using real-time reports found no happiness plateau at $75k; instead, well-being continued increasing with income, including above $200k. The relationship was logarithmic - going from $40k to $80k mattered more than going from $160k to $200k, but the benefit didn't disappear. [2]
So of course, in 2023, Kahneman and Killingsworth jointly re-analyzed to resolve the conflict, leading to more nuanced conclusions: in the least-happy 15-20%, unhappiness declined as income went up but eventually leveled off; for the majority of people, happiness continued rising with income beyond $75k; in the happiest people, the association sometimes became stronger at higher incomes. [3]
Science, baby!
[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1011492107
Re: Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets
#916Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ethics are probably internalized long before someone commits to an engineering career. I'm not sure they can be taught later.
This is obviously true to a large extent, but it is also weirdly necessary to explain basic ethical precepts to a surprisingly large number of otherwise well-educated people. Believe it or not, a significant number of people simple don’t know that it’s unethical to, e.g. exfiltrate code or data from a former employer. Making it clear that this is an ethical line may have some value.
I mean a lot of people work for companies that do unethical things to their customers all day, why would the company expect ethical treatment back?
Re: Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets
#917Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> I think a mandatory first thing for any engineer is to learn, understand and commit for life to the Ethics of their profession. That’ll never happen with the current incentives. Programming is too easy to get started with and too well-paid to not attract unethical people who are only interested in money.
At the same time why would businesses want programmers with high standards of ethics? Such programmers wouldn't make the child killing drone software, or the software that steals their life savings via dark patterns.
Re: Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets
#918Some 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…
What does the financial compensation need to be for an engineer to actually do this? I'm gonna assume that if you work at Apple and are being recruited by OpenAI, you are not a dummy. Then you probably know that doing something like this runs the risk of you getting sued by a trillion dollar company. If I had a potential employer ask me to do this, I would reply "oh hell fucking no", withdraw my application, and noti…
Goes the other way around too: many many employees didn't care about layoffs or the less fortunate until [complete this sentence].
Re: Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets
#919Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 suspe…
> my identity got stolen
I've seen it argued that "identity theft" is the way businesses with poor fraud detection make that your problem.
I.e. there's no "identity theft", there's fraud, and the company that was defrauded tries to weasel out like it's not their laxity at fault.
Re: Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets
#920If instead of downloading the files they took the info out in the form of neural network trained on the files and able to reproduce the information, that would be just fair use, 100 pound.
Is the same clean room technique used for code bases.
The fair use concept applies to any copyrighted material, I suppose.
BTW, maybe OpenAI can build on this their defence line. If they prove in court that the materials they got from Apple have never been used for design of products, and OpenAI only collected some linguistic statistics from the docs (as we know, training LLM is concepfually no different from calculating word frequencies), which does not violate copyrights. As for possible similafities in pfoducts to the Apple design, that's just a coincedence, developers can come to equal solutions when solving equal problenms. Equipped with modern AI assistants they quickly re-discover approaches others have discovered.