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Apple reveals 'shocking evidence' from ex-employee's MacBook in OpenAI suit

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11–20 of 205 posts

Re: Apple reveals 'shocking evidence' from ex-employee's MacBook in OpenAI suit

#11
post #4

Happened at a (large) company I worked for in the past. A devops guy stole the DB ahead of going to work with a rival, he was caught and the rival of course wanted nothing to do with it. I'm not sure of his fate but it couldn't have been much fun.

Happens occasionally at big corporations, even the bloodsucking vampire. Best to distance yourself from such employees - lest they will do to you what they have done to others.

The difference is, relative to OpenAi they have standards and morals.

Re: Apple reveals 'shocking evidence' from ex-employee's MacBook in OpenAI suit

#12
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really OpenAI but today's society. I say this started with the "just do it and ask for forgiveness later" attitude that started maybe 20 or 30 years ago. At one time most people had respect, even people at the top, now many people just do what they want. Plus most of the time they get away with it.

We can fix this by holding each other accountable. Peer pressure and community sanctions of bad actors will result in the changes we need.

Guessing you haven't take the HR training - thats not allowed anymore.

Re: Apple reveals 'shocking evidence' from ex-employee's MacBook in OpenAI suit

#14
> Apple argues that when trade secret information is fed into an AI agent or model that learns from it, that learning “may create irreversible and continually propagating uses of the trade secret.”

This is somewhat of a high impact argument to test. I wonder if the case will eventually get to working this point out.

Re: Apple reveals 'shocking evidence' from ex-employee's MacBook in OpenAI suit

#15
post #2

Reminds me of the story of an ex-Coca-Cola employee who offered to sell the secret recipe to Pepsi. Pepsi immediately let Coca-Cola know and it was handled. Not a good look for OpenAI. They come off as desperate and unprofessional.

Funny to imagine that food scientists at these companies must have cracked these recipes decades ago, and the secrecy might now only serve as a loyalty test for the uninitiated in the food and beverage guild.

Re: Apple reveals 'shocking evidence' from ex-employee's MacBook in OpenAI suit

#16
> Apple alleges that Liu ran a simulation in March using the circuit schematic file in LTspice, an electrical engineering tool. In messages from around that time, Liu said his AI “agent” learned to run LTspice and review the results.

"I didn't steal it, I fed it to an agent who then fed it back to me".

> Apple argues that when trade secret information is fed into an AI agent or model that learns from it, that learning “may create irreversible and continually propagating uses of the trade secret.

Ok I'm hooked

Re: Apple reveals 'shocking evidence' from ex-employee's MacBook in OpenAI suit

#17
> Additionally, Apple learned about Liu’s use of the schematic because he used it on a Mac mini which later synced via iCloud to the MacBook he took from Apple. Apple now also wants access to that Mac mini.

I'm very curious about the privacy implications of this. I know that anything I do and store on my company's laptop can be tracked, but I hadn't considered that if I forgot to sign out of my personal Gmail on it that they could legally search that information.

The files syncing to the company laptop's disk is a layer of nuance that makes this situation tricky to evaluate.

Re: Apple reveals 'shocking evidence' from ex-employee's MacBook in OpenAI suit

#18
post #2

Reminds me of the story of an ex-Coca-Cola employee who offered to sell the secret recipe to Pepsi. Pepsi immediately let Coca-Cola know and it was handled. Not a good look for OpenAI. They come off as desperate and unprofessional.

That's because pepsi already had coca-cola's secret recipe. I'm sure if they didn't have it already they would have been more than happy to at least have some knowledge before reporting it, but not like they didn't have the talent, money or technology to reverse engineer it at least a decade ago at that point.

Re: Apple reveals 'shocking evidence' from ex-employee's MacBook in OpenAI suit

#19
post #5
post #2

Reminds me of the story of an ex-Coca-Cola employee who offered to sell the secret recipe to Pepsi. Pepsi immediately let Coca-Cola know and it was handled. Not a good look for OpenAI. They come off as desperate and unprofessional.

Not really OpenAI but today's society. I say this started with the "just do it and ask for forgiveness later" attitude that started maybe 20 or 30 years ago. At one time most people had respect, even people at the top, now many people just do what they want. Plus most of the time they get away with it.

Well the asking for forgiveness part is also missing in this case, entirely.

Re: Apple reveals 'shocking evidence' from ex-employee's MacBook in OpenAI suit

#20
post #14

> Apple argues that when trade secret information is fed into an AI agent or model that learns from it, that learning “may create irreversible and continually propagating uses of the trade secret.” This is somewhat of a high impact argument to test. I wonder if the case will eventually get to working this point out.

There's already some precedent when dealing with humans reverse engineering systems. We use "cleanroom" approaches where the ones doing the reverse engineering are segregated from those doing the later design and development work. Instead of producing a design document based on the thing being studied, the reverse engineers produce a specification from which a new design, untainted by knowledge of the original design, is produced.

People using ML to try and reverse-engineer and create a "clean" version of things will likely need to use a similar approach. You can't ask one LLM to take in a circuit design as input and produce a specification and design within the same context. The resulting design will be at least partially informed by knowledge of the original design. The way to do this safely (potentially still with suits happening, but safer at least) will be to have one execution to produce a specification, and a second fresh execution taking the specification to produce a design. At least then you know your LLM was not aware of the original design.

Of course, LLM agents "cheat", so you'll also want to be careful to ensure a clean environment if you're using an agent that does not provide access to the original design material.

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