Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple says more ex-employees may have taken confidential data to OpenAI

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 304 posts

Re: Apple says more ex-employees may have taken confidential data to OpenAI

#151

Post by kbelder »

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #120
slashdave wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't assume the entire AI industry behaves like OpenAI

Isomorphic plagiarism by definition must steal from experts/creatives, chat/markup users, and or other models. Compaction and dynamic granularity encoding only abstract the Micky Mouse trademarked logo lurking in almost every model. =3

>Isomorphic plagiarism by definition must steal from experts/creatives

You seem to want to be precise, so you should probably use a different term than 'stealing'. It, by definition, is not the correct term.

Re: Apple says more ex-employees may have taken confidential data to OpenAI

#152

Post by saghm »

danesparza wrote: post #21
giancarlostoro wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is both a yikes (towards Apple) and very unethical (towards OpenAI and the engineers who did this). Why do people do these things? Do you have no shame that you might have a harder time landing future jobs if you're perceived as someone who might sell out your future employer on a whim and steal proprietary information?

"Why do people do these things" Money, ideology, coercion, and ego.

Also likely a healthy dose of confidence that they wouldn't get caught (seemingly overconfidence, but I suppose maybe they were just extremely unlucky)

Re: Apple says more ex-employees may have taken confidential data to OpenAI

#153

Post by hector_vasquez »

paxys wrote: post #118

When I was interviewing for a new software job a couple years ago every company wanted to know details about past projects. What I built, what technical decisions I took, what scale I operated at, what the setbacks were, what was the final result. Some companies even made the round presentation style, like a real tech spec review, and you had to present slides and architecture diagrams. And the project had to be real…

The allegation is that OpenAI explicitly requested that people bring and explain actual prototypes ("show and tell"), and downloading files from iCloud Drive after quitting Apple to join OpenAI. What you're describing is not even remotely on this level.

Re: Apple says more ex-employees may have taken confidential data to OpenAI

#154

Post by saghm »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #25
halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They probably were presented with huge comp packages which made bending ethics incredibly easy.

Unless its enough money to retire, I just don't understand people doing it for money.

Even then, I don't really understand the logic, because it seems like that doesn't take into account the risks and magnitude of the downside. The downside of losing a lot of money from lawsuits or even potentially going to jail is pretty huge, and I don't see how to make the expected value come out positive when any more money beyond "I can safely retire immediately" honestly wouldn't make my life significantly happier.

All this is moot of course because I'm weird and don't have any desire to make money from things I don't consider ethical even if I knew for sure I could get away with it, but I can at least understand other people not feeling constrained in that way (or not finding this particular thing unethical, since from a lot of these threads it's clear that the idea of "trade secret" as something legally protected is not universally popular). This crime in particular just doesn't seem like a smart one to do even for people who don't mind the idea of making money from it.

Re: Apple says more ex-employees may have taken confidential data to OpenAI

#155

Post by groundzeros2015 »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #25
halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They probably were presented with huge comp packages which made bending ethics incredibly easy.

Unless its enough money to retire, I just don't understand people doing it for money.

When you’re in these circles there is pressure to earn even more money (which is part of the employee retention plan). There is always someone richer. There is always a property you would like to buy.

Re: Apple says more ex-employees may have taken confidential data to OpenAI

#156

Post by charlesfries »

paxys wrote: post #123

This entire OpenAI hardware thing is a vanity project by Sam Altman wanting really bad to be Steve Jobs. Just look at this comical announcment photo and letter from last year https://openai.com/sam-and-jony/ . If this lawsuit results in the whole thing getting canned it might actually be good for OpenAI because it'll save them from pouring further billions down the drain over what will eventually be the Humane Pin 2.…

Tangentially related, but I was rewatching the old iPhone 3G keynote recently, and you wouldn't believe who made an appearance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_X5xOI_qu9I&t=1649s

Re: Apple says more ex-employees may have taken confidential data to OpenAI

#157

Post by ktallett »

nrmitchi wrote: post #94
everforward wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but this is about IP law instead of physical goods. This is like if you left your door wide open, and a neighbor peaked in and told another neighbor about your decor or what posters are on the walls. You didn’t lose anything tangible, but something you wanted to be secret isn’t anymore. Where the balance of blame falls is up to you, but I do think to some degree that if you want to keep a secret and can’t put i…

There are absolutely laws about IP theft. That's why it's called Intellectual Property . You really don't want the law to be "Well you didn't lose a physical thing, so why should it be illegal?"

It isn't ever quite that simple. It also depends whether that person only used information that is publicly available to deduce how to do it at the new company.

Re: Apple says more ex-employees may have taken confidential data to OpenAI

#158

Post by groundzeros2015 »

pclowes wrote: post #63

Apple is historically successfully secretive. I suspect their security “lapses” are more along the lines of “give them enough rope to thoroughly hang themselves”

Apple is large. People free stronger allegiance to their cultural and ethnic groups than their companies. They just don’t want to get in trouble.

Re: Apple says more ex-employees may have taken confidential data to OpenAI

#159

Post by znpy »

blltprfmnk wrote: post #40
znpy wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really think this is apple feeling really threatened rather than confidential data really being stolen. Apple is known for threatening companies that hire from them, and occasionally having secret agreements with other companies not to hire from each other. People move from a company to a direct competitor all the time (i have a number of friends that went from working at aws to working on gcloud for example) and g…

I don’t know where you’re drawing your conclusions from but they literally have messages from the OpenAI exec laughing at how he can still access data at Apple and talking about copying it, as well as messages encouraging candidates from Apple to bring unreleased prototype hardware to demonstrate during interviews.

Which in fairness should be blamed on the candidates, not on the company.

I might as well do the same just to be able to filter out candidates willing to do that.

And laughing about the possibility of copying data doesn’t necessarily mean anything was actually copied.

And in the end the know-how is in the people, so whatever apple has it getting out anyway when people leave.

Re: Apple says more ex-employees may have taken confidential data to OpenAI

#160

Post by solfox »

jdross wrote: post #69

Apple is cutthroat in business too. Tony Fadell, the inventor of the iPod and co-inventor of the iPhone, and later Nest founder, commented this in Stratechery about the lawsuit when filed: "This is Apple’s typical tactic to scare Apple employees — either former or current. I heard this lawsuit was driven by the Apple board. Steve threatened to file a lawsuit against Nest for poaching 80-100 Apple employees. He called…

I'm no OpenAI apologist here, but I appreciate this perspective. Apple definitely played their timing right for maximum pre-IPO damage. It gives them tremendous negotiating leverage on a possible settlement which could give them a chunk of OpenAI.
Post reply on HN