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Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets

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Re: Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets

#651

Post by nsagent »

aesthesia wrote: post #564
nullbio wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> do you think they are just lying Yes. They're constantly lying, and constantly getting caught for it. They have a reputation for it. Why do you think this would be any different? Their standard opt-out agreement frames it as if they won't train on your data, but they do anyway, due to legal loopholes. They essentially clean-room everyone who opts-out, so while it's "technically" not training on "your" data, to the…

Can you elaborate on the loopholes here?

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 Privacy Policy [3] explicitly allows for the use of deidentified data, it's possible they consider rewrites (maybe paired with a model used to identify explicit PII) to be deidentified. Whether OpenAI's legal team thinks rewriting in this way technically means they aren't training on your data isn't something I'm able to comment on.

Here's the relevant Privacy Policy statement:

  We also aggregate or de-identify Personal Data so that it no longer identifies you and use this information for the purposes described above, such as to analyze the way our Services are being used, to improve and add features to them, and to conduct research. We will maintain and use de-identified information in de-identified form and not attempt to reidentify the information, unless required by law.
Please note all the hedging words I used (maybe, possibly, etc). I honestly have no clue if they are doing this. I'm merely elaborating on a possible loophole like you asked.

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07724

[2]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.14689

[3]: https://openai.com/policies/privacy-policy/

Re: Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets

#652

Post by pdpi »

chii wrote: post #648
pdpi wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the only reason you didn't behave that way to begin with is that you lack the money and power to evade the consequences, then yes. You really are that person.

while i somewhat agree with that reasoning, it can go too far - most people would murder and kill if there weren't any consequences to doing so. But is it right to say who they really are as being murderers?

Most people would what? No, I don’t believe that’s true.

Re: Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets

#653

Post by Zigurd »

general1465 wrote: post #470
azinman2 wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anthropic trains on your data regardless of you opting out, I know that one for certain. How do you know that?

They systematically violated copyright when they grabbed whole internet to train their models. Do you really believe that they will stop stealing because they signed some funny ToS? Especially when every bit of data they have and competition does not have is making their model better.

Blame copyright law. AI training is very comparable to compiling an inverted index, which is considered transformational even though you can recover the input documents from an inverted index.

Re: Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets

#654

Post by dimitrios1 »

joshstrange wrote: post #2

Some 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…

> it's "here is how to steal secrets on your way out" which is even grosser.

Thank you for recognizing this. As much as the developer community has come out against companies non-competes in the past, we should come down on even harder on one of our own stealing, because this does the most harm against the case against non-competes. It's grosser in the sense that one company doing a foul thing is bad, but ideally people can band together and work to dismantle the foul thing. But a person legitimizing the foul thing is the greater harm.

Re: Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets

#655

Post by raverbashing »

discopicante wrote: post #626
taurath wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is how you behave when you think you're so much smarter than everyone around you that consequences don't apply to you. Its also how some folks act like when they've done something they morally can't deal with - their subconscious starts throwing all sorts of obvious signs up until they get caught. I presume this was done for a giant pile of cash, stock, and probably a promise that nobody really cares if you sh…

These were long tenured and valued employees at Apple. They likely already had healthy pile of cash and stock. Maybe it was the environment at OpenAI encouraging this behavior. Or, is this a particular set of skills some/all of the individuals mentioned were already well-practiced at? I hope this case goes to court so we can find out.

Or they simply don't care, or don't see it as a problem

Re: Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets

#656

Post by hgffrur »

chii wrote: post #648
pdpi wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the only reason you didn't behave that way to begin with is that you lack the money and power to evade the consequences, then yes. You really are that person.

while i somewhat agree with that reasoning, it can go too far - most people would murder and kill if there weren't any consequences to doing so. But is it right to say who they really are as being murderers?

> most people would murder and kill if there weren't any consequences to doing so

…yeah, it’s fitting that sama was the top user here. What a wretched hive of scum and villainy.

Re: Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets

#657

Post by taude »

Lio wrote: post #454

OpenAI is a company built on copyright violation. That means it’s in the corporate DNA to treat laws as things for little people. Apple have deep enough pockets that they can actually sue OpenAI but I bet OpenAI are surprised they got caught. Now ask yourself, would the Codex agents on your machine ever over step legal boundaries? Would OpenAI ever make use of data you, voluntarily, send to their servers? If they did…

Everyone is deluding themselves if they think their enterprise privacy contracts with these frontier model companies (especially in CA) aren't reading and processing their private data

Re: Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets

#658

Post by sdsdssweew213 »

SXX wrote: post #337
decimalenough wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're earning $100k in Silicon Valley, your expenses will swallow up almost all of that. A sudden $100k windfall, on the other hand, tax free and suitably invested,will let you live for years quite comfortably in many poor countries.

Sorry to disappoint you, but no you cannot live "comfortably" in "poor countries" for $100,000 for "years". Well, unless you mean like two years. I lived across South East Asia for more than decade and now live here full time. I have to live on around $20,000 / year most of the time since starting my company. And I do not live anywhere close to what average US / EU citizen will call "comfortable" let alone people fro…

I live in what according to Wikipedia is 18th most expensive country in the world. Average person working full time as a nurse here earns about 30k dollars a year after taxes. If they can survive here, 20k a year in most of South East Asia should be perfectly fine for comfortable life.

Re: Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets

#659

Post by meken »

nullbio wrote: post #384
etchalon wrote: post #243

What a neat culture OpenAI has.

This is a drop in the ocean compared to what Anthropic does behind closed doors.

I’ve seen an uptick in these types of comment on HN - vague ominous sounding attacks on Anthropic.

It honestly seems like a coordinated PR effort from OpenAI folks to “both sides” the companies.

Which would, if true, be a further indictment of the culture at OpenAI.

Re: Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets

#660

Post by AbstractH24 »

baxtr wrote: post #640
html5cat wrote: post #197

Interesting how Tang Yew Tan worked at Apple for 25 years (!!) and then threw it all out for this.

Reminds me of the (infamous) eBay sellers back in the days who collected perfect ratings for a couple of years just to suddenly turn into scammers, pulling off what was known as a "long con" or "exit scam."

Which reminds me of most reddit right now
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