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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.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2006/jul/07/marketingandpr... - I had only vague memories of this, but here's an article from the time about it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
question to clarify: If the LLM designs the circuit, it is clear "contamination" if the tool calls which wrote the RTL / Verilog are also in the same context window as the specification design. If a windows DLL, distributed without a license that says anything regarding, is it a "clean room implementation" if there is some nonzero chance the source code was leaked into the weights at pre-train time? I guess there sho…
You can't ensure it properly segregates its knowledge so it's a legal risk. If you believe your LLM can generate a design from a spec without knowledge of the original, why would you take that unnecessary risk? A lot of the behavior in this area is meant to avoid the appearance of impropriety, because the appearance of impropriety forces you to defend and demonstrate there was none.
If you isolate the two behaviors (reverse engineer design to spec; convert spec to new design) then you have a legal defense. You can claim that any coincidentally too similar design elements are a consequence of standard design patterns or something, not a consequence of inherent knowledge of the original design.
This is why we separate the people into distinct roles, there's no reason not to do the same (or expect the same) with machines. If you don't want the legal cover, of course, by all means take the risk and enjoy a trillion dollar company taking you to court.
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.
Even if they were to take the recipe and publish it for all to see, you would still need all of the other machinery that is Coca-Cola to make Coca-Cola.
And then you have issues of quality. Coca-Cola has certain standards, it's not a guarantee that everyone else will have those same standards. Like, people buy the expensive brand of milk despite all milk being the same. It's one ingredient. With quality standards given by the government. There is really no room for interpretation.
The claims: - Mr. Liu not only downloaded a confidential Apple circuit schematic but also used it in his work at OpenAI; - Far from his unauthorized access to Apple’s third-party cloud storage being unknown to him, Mr. Liu and others at OpenAI were well-aware of that access; - Mr. Liu, upon learning of Apple’s internal investigation of him, sent instructions for destroying evidence to an OpenAI colleague who confirme…
I have a former coworker who was the VP of Finance at my company. He suddenly got fired out of the blue. The company was in the midst of trying to find a buyer (this was announced) so this was extra surprising. Turns out, he knew a lot of bad news about the company, and they caught him looking for a job. They fired him because he was too much of a liability.
How did they catch him? He was putting resumes and cover letters on OneDrive. "Yeah, in retrospect, that's one of the dumber things I've ever done," he said to me later.
> 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 t…
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.
One could make the argument that "just do it and ask for forgiveness later" is what the entire LLM industry is based on. They swallowed up all of society’s copyrighted texts without really asking for permission from anyone. This is just par for the course for them it seems unfortunately.
IP theft can really pay off.