The title is “ Ex-Google engineer charged with stealing AI trade secrets while working with Chinese companies”
Ex-Google engineer charged with stealing trade secrets
131–140 of 497 posts
Re: Ex-Google engineer charged with stealing trade secrets
#132Google has a fair bit of experience with employees stealing trade secrets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Levandowski#Criminal_c...
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Re: Ex-Google engineer charged with stealing trade secrets
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Hiring a Chinese national and giving them access to trade secrets To be fair, this would have been prohibited if we subjected AI to ITAR restrictions. That said, do we know Ding was a Chinese national?
If US prevented Chinese people for working on US AI, US would be in a far worse position in AI. Half of AI contributors in US are Chinese.
Why do they bother spying on us if they’re so far ahead then?
Re: Ex-Google engineer charged with stealing trade secrets
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you mean morally or legally? It's hard to imagine a Google engineer not knowing that sharing trade secrets is something their employer would seriously frown upon, no?
Is your allegiance to your employer above your allegiance to your country?
The statement is not about allegiance, it is about knowledge of breaking company policy and conducting corporate espionage.
The question is, just to clear: "Regardless of whether it is right or wrong according to his personal morality, do we honestly believe that he didn't know it was going to anger his employer and likely violate his employment agreement to the extent that he'd face civil or legal penalties?"
Re: Ex-Google engineer charged with stealing trade secrets
#135[flagged]
Most F50 companies will not hire those without citizenship and will be reluctant to hire talent born in China to protect trade secrets. The number of Chinese students at the local BIG!) university by me is a fraction of what it was in 2019. Companies are well aware of the risks now.
Re: Ex-Google engineer charged with stealing trade secrets
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Serious question: Can we presume he knew he was doing something wrong?
Do you mean morally or legally? It's hard to imagine a Google engineer not knowing that sharing trade secrets is something their employer would seriously frown upon, no?
There's a name for it, it's called Shadow IT. It's the most common and often non-malicious kind of data leak. The only reason we care about it here, is because he's Chinese, and because he allegedly did meaningful things at Google.
I went to Kubecon in Shanghai last year, and they should have probably just called it LLMcon, since that seems to be 90% of what big tech in China is focused on right now. Not saying that there probably wasn't some interesting stuff in the data he took, but I think people here massively underestimate the talent and investment in China in this domain. Nvidia literally just identified Huawei as their top competitor[1].
I've never had an imposter syndrome as big as the one I had there (and in Taiwan, but more on the hardware side of things) anywhere in the valley.
[1] https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/gadgets-news/nvidia-list...
Re: Ex-Google engineer charged with stealing trade secrets
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
All Chinese startups are Communist Party companies, success dictates just *how* tied-in they are.
exactly, this guy understands how business in China works.
How do you imagine this works, western government can’t manage potholes but CCP beurocrats can manage AI, Car production and solar panel production and beat our companies? Are they superhuman?
Re: Ex-Google engineer charged with stealing trade secrets
#138[flagged]
> > The case against Ding, 38, was announced at an American Bar Association conference in San Francisco by Attorney General Merrick Garland,
Yeah, this seems very suspicious.
Re: Ex-Google engineer charged with stealing trade secrets
#139[flagged]
Justice dept and FBI love any chance for photo ops and press releases patting themselves on the back. I'm not sure there's too much ace detective work to be proud of here - seems Google heard he'd presented as a CEO of a Chinese firm days after he quit, and must have given the FBI a call.
It makes a good story, but the current crop of LLM-based AI's don't seem to require much more than a bit of prior job experience to build. The most successful recentish AI/LLM startups such as Anthropic, Mistral and Reka.ai all have ex. Google, OpenAI and Meta employees as founders, and that prior experience appears plently enough to hit the ground running.
Re: Ex-Google engineer charged with stealing trade secrets
#140[flagged]
Yah, so there is a problem here in that many of these "homeland nationalistic" folks who send stuff back to "their governments" are in many instances, citizens of the country they are betraying. Since these two[1][2] incidents, I wondered deeply for a while, what is going to happen here as it seems the CCP is getting more and more brazen. I don't believe it would be legal for "enhanced background checks" on someone i…
>I don't believe it would be legal for "enhanced background checks" on someone in the hiring process because they are Chinese American,
It absolutely would be legal if AI was recategorized as ITAR. In 2022, dual citizenship was cracked down on in ITAR regulations and dual(or more) citizen individuals must now be deeply vetted for contact with ITAR Section 126.1 countries which include China.