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Apple says more ex-employees may have taken confidential data to OpenAI
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- yoyoma1234 2mo agoYes
- ofjcihen 2mo agoOpenAIs response: https://openai.com/index/apple-is-getting-this-wrong/ https://openai.com/index/apple-is-getting-this-wrong/ Personally, this reads a bit ridiculous in the face of what Apple is claiming but time will tell.
- ncr100 2mo agoThis should be shown in court, first, to avoid predictable blowback around making a weak-appeal. I feel like OpenAI is attempting to obscure the public sentiment trend. And that are willing to taint a jury pool by releasing evidence. I assume then, that OpenAI is "feeling" or has determined it is perceived negatively by the public, in general. They may be seeking to influence their talent pipeline, to reduce inbound constraint they predict are coming from a lack of perceived trustworthiness of OpenAI. Seems inappropriate for OpenAI to post this public-appeal, to me.
- bpodgursky 2mo agoTech company drama is followed by .1% of the population. The jury pool is not going to be tainted. This has no impact on the public and nobody expects it to.
- ofjcihen 2mo agoIt’s the insinuation of racism regarding the “mixing up Asian last names” bit that’s really got me feeling like their response is the public appeal move.
- ncr100 2mo agoYikes, yes that's a great point. Implicit racism in OpenAI's messaging.
- freejazz 2mo ago> This should be shown in court "Weak security" isn't a defense to theft, so probably wont. >Seems inappropriate for OpenAI to post this public-appeal, to me. They are desperate and are behaving desperately. Who actually qualifies anything they say anymore anyway? I certainly don't
- brcmthrowaway 2mo agoWow. This makes Apple seem like amateur hour. The case should be dismissed with prejudice.
- scottyah 2mo agoDoes it though? It certainly seems like that's what openai wants, but even with a tiny grain of salt this just looks ugly to me. Also trying to make the texts look like imessages even though they're clearly rewritten (not screenshots) is off-putting.
- chasd00 2mo agoyeah that is pretty crazy, who is even the intended audience? This seems like something they'd be discussing with their legal team instead of blogging about it. To me, these kinds of public outbursts are just making their hole deeper. IP disputes between some of the richest corporations on the planet don't get a lot of sympathy in the court of public opinion anyway. Even if they did, what difference does it make? There isn't a sheriff or DA with a public face that has to make a decision here.
- slashdave 2mo agoI mean... who has control over OpenAI's web page? No self-respecting PR firm would do something like this. And Counsel must be hopping mad.
- SiempreViernes 2mo ago> And, [OpenAI] said that Apple didn’t admit to the claim that the “residual access” allowing former employees to access Apple’s system was the result of poor security procedures on Apple’s part. Sam "I hack others by mistake" Altman dunking on the security practice of others is funny, is there any glass house he won't go to?
- bigyabai 2mo agoIn fairness, that's an incredibly glaring MDM problem that was always going to blow up like a landmine if Apple didn't address it. I'd expect the macOS MDM policy to cover this if Apple was actually concerned about IP leakage.
- Melatonic 2mo agoYup - exactly. Its crazy they havent developed a solution to this for their customers (let alone themselves) or bought out one of the companies that tries
- giancarlostoro 2mo agoThat 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?
- alwa 2mo agoFuture jobs? I thought AGI was the future of work! And plus, their duty is to a higher cause! All humanity needs them to win, so that the superintelligence is “aligned” to their superior values… like “all’s fair in love and war”! (/s) …rumblings of “divine mandate” in there somewhere…
- giancarlostoro 2mo agoI thought AGI was supposed to come soon? Wasn't Sam Altman saying that it would come last year? I would love to see genuinely demonstrations of these labs different AGI attempts because I am a skeptic on AGI, I'm fine with LLMs.
- datakan 2mo agoReally don't like all the drama around this. Should be dealt with in court, not tried in the press. Both sides should learn to remain silent and work the case through legal channels.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 2mo agoSeems to be Altman's playbook, just like how he got the CEO job back.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- eagerpace 2mo agoThis, and the books, and the government contracts, and the distillation… It’s like that one friend who complains how drama always finds them and they are clueless why.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- georgemcbay 2mo ago> Both sides should learn to remain silent and work the case through legal channels. This isn't a "both sides" situation. OpenAI is posting drama blog posts. Apple isn't doing that. "Apple says" in the headline here actually means: Apple filed for a preliminary injunction with the court and since that is a public record we are reporting the contents of it.
- sublinear 2mo agoIt's OpenAI still trying to maintain control of the narrative while they burn to the ground. For years they haven't really delivered while bullying anyone who doesn't have an "AI strategy". The media is happy to stoke the flames.
- freejazz 2mo ago>Both sides should learn to remain silent and work the case through legal channels. Why? Apple surely doesn't want to and why should they?
- giancarlostoro 2mo agoI have never gone from one job to another where the new job was in the same exact industry I was in prior, but I'm glad I never have to be thrown into such a scenario where I'm accused of taking confidential data, I can only imagine for some employers that makes you a red flag, very dangerous territory to be in.
- CBLT 2mo agoThe only time I did that, the company I was leaving begged me to take one of their corp laptops with me so I could offer "consulting" to them on the side. I never called them on their plausible deniability, I just said I felt that would be a conflict of interest and they shut up real fast.
- warkdarrior 2mo agoEhmm... offering "consulting" should come with a contract specifying scope of work, data/device access, and expectations.
- devsda 2mo agoCan you elaborate on the plausible deniability part. Was your past employer trying to make best of the situation by hoping to fish for information about your next employer's projects via the consulting gig?
- CBLT 2mo agoI said "never called them on their plausible deniability" to mean I never pulled off the veil of the conversation, so there's nothing to talk about in front of a judge. FWIW both the company I was leaving and the company I was joining were startups selling dynamic seat pricing systems to airlines. Your call if that's a conflict of interest :).
- bigyabai 2mo ago> I [...] imagine for some employers that makes you a red flag Maybe. It also advertises a moral flexibility that is high in-demand here in America. Clearly OpenAI has no scruples entertaining a turncoat of this scale, I can believe that businesses will be lined up out the door to hire these people.
- josefritzishere 2mo agoAI seems to always be stealing from someone
- slashdave 2mo agoPlease don't assume the entire AI industry behaves like OpenAI
- Joel_Mckay 2mo agoIsomorphic 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
- kbelder 2mo ago>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.
- Joel_Mckay 2mo agostealing: "To take (the property of another) without right or permission." A Trademark is considered intellectual property. It is theft, and Disney could still drop a boot on the industry. Similar works found in high-dimension vector search spaces also do not escape legal peril in copyright similarity cases. Perhaps some conflated the methodology of training and use of generative mechanisms with the legal interpretation of "uncopyrightable" output in commercial settings. =3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhgYMH6n004 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhgYMH6n004
- christkv 2mo agoI might be dense but from what I read I have no idea why any of the stolen documents have any value to OpenAI in the context of their business. Knowing Apples maybe future products etc seems pointless.
- thewebguyd 2mo agoOpenAI has been talking about making hardware for a while now, and most likely they are going to attempt a smartphone.
- christkv 2mo agoI mean do they need any of this for that. All of it is in the software anyway and the Android stack is there already.
- thewebguyd 2mo agoFrom the filing: The stolen files, NAMED: >DisplayNotes.key — "several hundred pages" on Apple's custom display power development program >Architecture analyses. Fabrication decisions. Testing results >Engineering data for an UNANNOUNCED Apple product: 'touch, display, and power systems" >Final.key + V2.key — compilations of two undisclosed Apple R&D projects >and those are "only four of the dozens of proprietary documents Mr. Liu stole" Also >OpenAI "directed a trusted Apple partner [name redacted] to perform [Apple's proprietary metal finishing] process for them, knowing it was proprietary to Apple... because they were involved in this partnership while at Apple." So apparently yes, OpenAI is very interested in Apple's hardware. I don't see any references to software secrets in the filing, it seems to be entirely about hardware.
- user43928 2mo agoI had a quick look at the texts released by OpenAI, and it looked to me like a former Apple employee was sharing info and documents with a current Apple employee in an attempt to help out. I do not know whether this lines up with the claims of stolen files. The second part reads to me like they asked some company to perform a special metal finishing, knowing that they perform similar work for Apple. I am no lawyer and I do not understand what is proprietary to Apple here, it just does not sound that big a deal to me. Now that is a charitable reading. Maybe OpenAI ruthlessly stole Apple's trade secrets. I do not know.
- varispeed 2mo agoWhat is the issue here? Seems like Apple wants to own people. If you don't want employees to leave for competition, pay them well enough so they don't entertain the idea. It's always employer neglecting workers and then having pikachu face.
- pertymcpert 2mo agoThe issue is theft of IP.
- lorreyfum 2mo ago[flagged]
- senderista 2mo agoWhat was so great about Scott Forstall?
- Y-bar 2mo agoA sense of responsibility that the user experience should never be compromised. He never wanted to release Maps for example in the state it was, yet had to take the fall for its failure.
- ausbah 2mo agothis reads like a blind comment
- throwaway23597 2mo agoWhat on earth does this opinion have to do with anything?
- pclowes 2mo agoApple is historically successfully secretive. I suspect their security “lapses” are more along the lines of “give them enough rope to thoroughly hang themselves”
- tonyedgecombe 2mo agoA lot of the legal action is a warning to current employees who may have been considering doing the same.
- modeless 2mo agoApple leaks like a sieve. The extreme secrecy culture is a pointless drag on productivity, maintained long past its usefulness for the sole benefit of the execs practicing their Steve Jobs "one more thing" keynote cargo cult.
- mosura 2mo agoWhat is curious is Apple quality was much higher when they were secretive. The idea that it is a drag on productivity is self evidently wrong based on results.
- paxys 2mo agoThat secretive culture died over a decade ago. Everything gets leaked now.
- slashdave 2mo agoWhy do think they would want to be vindictive? The point is to prevent leaks, leaving lapses is exactly counter to that goal.
- groundzeros2015 2mo agoApple is large. People free stronger allegiance to their cultural and ethnic groups than their companies. They just don’t want to get in trouble.
- jdross 2mo agoApple 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 me, screamed for a while with lots of accusations. Then I said, “Steve, it’s Apple’s job to retain its talent, not mine.” He stopped his rant and then we went on to talk about our families and vacation plans. We kept hiring…"
- freediddy 2mo ago[flagged]
- _doctor_love 2mo agoIt's not alleged, it's sadly confirmed. There's been comments on HN over the years from people who have worked under him.
- hnlmorg 2mo agoThat example does a pretty good job of showing how toxic both CEOs are/were
- tomhow 2mo agoPlease don't use epithets like this on HN. It's unkind, even if there’s any truth to it. It's not about anything you owe to the person being discussed, but about the way we talk about people on HN. If there's an anecdote that illustrates what you mean, please share it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- freediddy 2mo agoYou can't accept a quote from Tony Fadell about how Apple was trying to "scare" employees without taking into consideration his considerably bad reputation. That is actively supporting disinformation. His quote is incredibly unreliable.
- vachina 2mo agoA few of my colleagues were fired for including source code derived from Apple specifications in their Copilot session (yes we use Copilot).
- jagged-chisel 2mo ago> … fired for including source code derived from Apple specifications There has to be more to this story. Do you have anything substantial that you could share?
- halostatue 2mo agoMany companies have rules that confidential materials cannot be used as context with LLMs. These companies (usually rightly) don't trust that there is a sufficient firewall preventing training on confidential materials, rendering the confidential materials effectively public.
- jagged-chisel 2mo agoI understand that. I’m curious about this specific situation.
- pop3zxcv 2mo agoDoes it matter? As long as the data is in the 1st brain and can be taken outside and used as a skill.
- cmiles8 2mo agoWell with OpenAI saying strongly the opposite now they can’t both be right. Someone is lying through their teeth here.
- namuol 2mo agoWhat’s the speculation about what leaked? Are we talking about next-gen on-device neural accelerators or something along those lines?
- mosura 2mo agoOne of the things mentioned was specific metal finishing techniques for manufacturing. The implication being at least some of this is to do with OpenAI making consumer hardware, as designed by Ives.
- dannyw 2mo agoI wonder if OpenAI could use a novel defence of “we’re just using it to train AI for better hardware intelligence. Fair use.” It seems to have played out decently in courts so far.
- nrmitchi 2mo agoIf Apple had published all of the details/data publicly, then they publicly could. But that is not the claim, and no one is even pretending that that's what happened.
- dannyw 2mo agoThe idea of companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, but also NVIDIA (so probably everyone) paying bitcoin (or having conversations about such at least) to 'fugitive sites' like Anna's Archive for a full download of their illegally acquired piracy archive would have been laughed out 5 years ago. My post was more of a joke, how "AI training" is now a get-out-of-jail free card.
- thewebguyd 2mo agoIt's probably not as much of a joke as we want to believe, given the current administration in power and the potential 5% stake in OpenAi via Kushner's firm, and how SamA can just pull the "national security...Chinese labs something something" argument along with some bribe money and potentially make this whole thing disappear. With the corruption so blatant and on public display now, and with how much the labs have been trying to sell "too big to fail" to the government, the standard rules no longer apply when it comes to anything involving these labs.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- hingler36 2mo agoA lot of the discussion here is pretty surprising. Saying "The information is in people's heads" is wild considering the allegations involve taking screenshots of documents, not just fond memories of working on hardware. Apple deserves a lot of criticism for how it's acted when losing employees, but these allegations are about a lot more than that.
- EA-3167 2mo agoIf OpenAI is willing to encourage people to commit literal crimes on their behalf as clumsily as we've seen evidence of, why would they hesitate to try and shift opinion on a site like this? Plus there has always been a bitter contingent of devs that hate the terms of getting on the App Store, and people who hate any hardware they can't fully control from the NAND up.
- senordevnyc 2mo agoGood thing there’s no bitter contingent of devs who hate Sam!
- EA-3167 2mo agoHe’s arguably one of the more hated public figures outside of politics, it would be much easier to list his die-hard fans.
- lostlogin 2mo agoDoes Musk count as outside or inside politics?
- preisschild 2mo agoBoth Musk and Sam Altman count. They are very active in politics.
- llelouch 2mo ago
- paxys 2mo agoWhen 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, something you had actually worked on at your current job. "But all this stuff is confidential, I can't really talk about it." "Well too bad. If you want the job, figure it out." So I did what probably thousands of engineers in silicon valley do every day, and leaked company IP. It got me the job, and I'm pretty sure all the interviewers forgot about what I said 5 minutes later. But in practice every tech interviewee and every company doing interviews today (including Apple) can be charged with most of what Apple is alleging.
- crazygringo 2mo ago> But in practice every tech interviewee and every company doing interviews today (including Apple) can be charged with most of what Apple is alleging. No it can't. I've worked for a bunch of tech companies large and small and interviewed for way more, and I have literally never seen this. What Apple is alleging is not normal at all, nor is your interview experience. I've literally never even heard of anything like you describe, presenting architecture diagrams of your previous work? That's such a huge red flag, and these companies are opening themselves up to similar lawsuits. The fact that you describe multiple companies requesting this is genuinely shocking to me.
- asadotzler 2mo agoYou're the odd one. I've been involved with and seen this at plenty of SV interviews. I've seen it from more than one interviewer at one company with one candidate.
- KerrAvon 2mo agoYou're making assumptions that aren't supported if you read the actual lawsuit.
- hector_vasquez 2mo ago
- MetaverseClub 2mo agoAt the end of the day, all the money Sam Assman used to lure people into doing crime will be paid for by all the 401k accounts of ordinary people.
- paxys 2mo agoThis 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/ 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 2.0.
- walrus01 2mo ago[flagged]
- hbn 2mo agoWe are all long aware that Jobs was a flawed individual. But he made good products that most people like to use. That was GP they were getting at with "he wants to be Steve Jobs." You don't need to hamfist that into the conversation every times Jobs' name comes up.
- jbs789 2mo agoNo need to be disrespectful.
- walrus01 2mo ago[flagged]
- ktallett 2mo agoWhy do you focus on the dead and not on the living who have done as bad?
- podgietaru 2mo agoYou can, and should, do both. The mythologising of some really bad people got us here.
- kontain 2mo agoScam Altman.
- Melatonic 2mo agoSaw this in the legal filing: "he took advantage of an authentication bug to gain access to Apple’s confidential third-party cloud repository to download at least thirty-seven highly sensitive and proprietary technical documents related to, among other things, Apple’s hardware technologies and research and development." Anybody know what they mean by "third party" ? Who provides Apple internal employees with a cloud repository?
- thewebguyd 2mo agoCould be any of the usual big names I'd suspect? Box, something from Atlassian, or maybe some home rolled thing on top of S3 or GCP?
- hmokiguess 2mo agowhat's the authentication bug?
- ta93754829 2mo agoit's a bug, in authentication
- alexander2002 2mo agoas in authentication in bug
- hmokiguess 2mo agooh thank you, I had thought it was an insect that can bypass systems after biting them
- 66yatman 2mo agoNo, it’s a technical term
- fragmede 2mo agoIf you've logged into GitHub anywhere else, SSO won't sign them out.
- pinkyboy 2mo ago[flagged]
- bigyabai 2mo ago[flagged]
- mortar 2mo agohttps://archive.is/GbXn0 https://archive.is/GbXn0
- cyanregiment 2mo agoIt's like a cartoon where the monkey finds the ruby, another takes it from his hand, another takes it from his hand, then a gorilla bonks them on the head and runs off with it, only to have it snatched by a swinging monkey who loses it to a python who drops it into the mouth of an alligator... who brings it deep underwater... accidentally swimming into the mouth of a giant whale, where inside the whale is an island where he coughs up the ruby, it's ejected out the blowhole high into the air before landing atop a tree and hitting every branch on the way down landing before a monkey who finds the ruby, another takes it from his hand, another takes it from his hand...
- leoh 2mo agoThis is such a disaster of Apple’s own making. Apple is retarded in that they encourage their employees to use their personal iCloud credentials while working there and make it very difficult for employees to request a serrate work phone. It is tremendously idiotic from a security standpoint and is not the way virtually any other big firm does things. As a Google employee I can’t imagine them compelling me to use a personal Gmail account for anything. Moreover, although we can use personal Android devices, most orgs make it easy for employees to get a separate work phone. To the degree they allow personal android devices, this is only because Google has done significant work to allow for an isolated “work” profile with an entirely different email address / login. Because iPhone lacks this feature, corporate access on those devices is heavily curtailed. I somehow doubt the Apple board has been made aware of these shenanigans and abhorrent security posture.
- gitpusher 2mo ago15 years ago we'd all be drooling breathlessly, wondering what sort of magical, earth-shattering new product Apple has been cooking up behind the scenes, and will we get to learn any details about it from the court case. Today... Who cares? Lol. I'm not convinced there's anything going on at Apple, secret or otherwise, that we would find particularly interesting.
- judge2020 2mo agoTrade secrets in AI and/or AI hardware would be pretty useful.
- rickdg 2mo agoI wonder what happens at a company where for many years the CEO insists on "don't come to me with your problems".
- test6554 2mo agoOpen AI is about to find out all about rounded corners
- crimsonnoodle58 2mo ago> multiple former Apple employees now working at OpenAI reached out to discuss returning Apple-issued work devices they kept when they left Apple Really Apple.. No device inventory and off boarding process?
- xdennis 2mo agoI'd rather have OpenAI steal from Apple, the most valuable company in the world than to steal from everyone else: published books, StackOverflow users, Reddit comments I made 15 years ago, etc. I have no sympathy at all for Apple in this case. Jobs didn't have any sympathy for Xerox when he stole from them.
- gigatexal 2mo agoI don’t know who wins. I know we do though. In discovery we are gonna get such great juicy details. I am in the camp that Sam Altman and company can’t be trusted. But who knows? Let’s see the case unfold.
- Ouman 2mo agoThere may be real misconduct here, but "some employees mishandled confidential information" and "OpenAI must stop developing AI hardware" are very different claims
- nc55g3g 2mo agoOpenAI poaching Apple hardware talent is a power move. They're clearly building something physical – an AI device. This is the lawsuit that defines the next decade of AI vs. big tech. Popcorn time.
- fooblaster 2mo agoIt is comical to think that AI has developed enough to replace the phone. This project is doomed without a protracted legal battle.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 2mo agoIs it just me that feels such schadenfreude seeing big companies hurt each other instead of regular people for a brief but refreshing moment?