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Apple reveals 'shocking evidence' from ex-employee's MacBook in OpenAI suit
- xvxvx 26d agoReminds 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.
- jmclnx 26d agoNot 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.
- doodlebugging 26d agoWe can fix this by holding each other accountable. Peer pressure and community sanctions of bad actors will result in the changes we need.
- Jtsummers 26d ago> Peer pressure and community sanctions of bad actors will result in the changes we need. It's been demonstrated over centuries that this is unreliable. We end up needing a third party (commonly governments) to step in and establish rules and referee behavior. We wouldn't have an EPA, FCC, SEC, or many other organizations and laws if private actors could successfully police themselves.
- doodlebugging 25d agoPrivate actors are inevitably part of groups. Those groups need to hold the individual members accountable. That obviously doesn't work any more in SV among wealth-obsessed tech-bros. It still works in other parts of the economy though.
- blitzar 26d agoGuessing you haven't take the HR training - thats not allowed anymore.
- doodlebugging 25d agoEvidently not in that industry.
- ViktorRay 26d agoOne 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.
- jimnotgym 25d agoOne could argue that it is what Trevithick did to make better steam engines, or what Cisco did with routers. Or countless others. IP theft can really pay off.
- baxtr 26d agoWell the asking for forgiveness part is also missing in this case, entirely.
- everybodyknows 26d agoIt's actually forbidden, by advice of legal counsel, because in court the other side would present it as evidence of knowing culpability.
- ted_dunning 25d agoIn legal speak "please forgive me" is pronounced "so sue me!"
- Jtsummers 26d agohttps://www.theguardian.com/media/2006/jul/07/marketingandpr.drink 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.
- 3ddds 26d ago[dead]
- asdff 26d agoFunny 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.
- himata4113 26d agoThat'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.
- bena 25d agoNo, it's because Pepsi isn't trying to be Coke, they're trying to be better than Coke. So having the recipe is kind of moot. 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.
- himata4113 25d agoIs this an AI response? coca-cola was replicated by one guy and confirmed in blind taste test by several other people, no magical machinery needed to make it once you know the ingredients. What about quality? That has nothing to do with it. Of course they're trying to be the better coke, that's why they tried making coke with the same color with more sugar and made the flavors stronger.
- s__s 25d agoCoca-Cola is the only company that can legally import and process raw coca leaves into a flavoring agent. It’s literally impossible to duplicate their exact recipe.
- jjtheblunt 25d agowhere did you find that? (super interesting)
- vasco 25d agoBased on all evidence so far Sam Altman has negative scruples so I'm pretty sure this would be incentivised if anything.
- dgellow 26d agoThe 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 confirmed she would comply; and - Mr. Liu used a tool in his work at OpenAI that has the same name as an internal Apple engineering application used for Apple development work.
- snapetom 25d agoGood lord. Smart people doing the dumbest things with their work equipment. 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.
- ebbi 25d agoWe have a plague here in NZ of top-level Police officers using work-issued devices to access and store CSAM material.
- computerex 25d agoWow that got dark real quick, mind sharing any links/evidence? Never would have thought NZ has a CSAM problem.
- comradesmith 25d agohttps://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/auckland-police-officer-matthew-rogers-pleads-guilty-to-one-objectionable-publication-charge/ENLIZOW5WBEU5BYQQBOPUSETAY/ https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/auckland-police-officer-matthe... Here’s one. There are more. Don’t be so naïve as to think any single country is free from these kinds of issues.
- karim79 26d agoHappened 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.
- gyomu 26d ago> the rival of course wanted nothing to do with it The key difference here seems to be that OpenAI very much wants something to do with it.
- jjtheblunt 25d agoIt's almost laughable how their behavior aligns with the "Scam Altman" snarky insult.
- microtherion 25d agoThat might be the most embarrassing implication for OpenAI out of the whole affair: That OpenAI, supposedly one of the vanguards in AI, saw a need to appropriate intellectual property of Apple, supposedly a complete laggard in that field.
- mdasen 25d agoWere they trying to get Apple's AI IP? I haven't followed that closely, but it seems like a lot of it has been around hardware design, not AI.
- dkuntz2 25d agoit doesn't seem like they want apple's ai secrets, they want apple's electrical engineering secrets for building physical devices
- blitzar 26d agoHappens 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.
- carabiner 26d agoI wonder how many times this has happened without anyone being caught.
- RodgerTheGreat 26d agoOr being caught, but without sufficiently rigorous evidence to take to court.
- tonyedgecombe 25d agoI wonder how much rope Apple gave these people to hang themselves with.
- Henchman21 25d agoThis feels like too much credit to Apple?
- joshka 26d ago> 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.
- Jtsummers 26d agoThere'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.
- dwrodri 26d agoquestion 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 should be some sort of method for subpoenaing frontier labs to ask "can you grep for this code in the training set for this model", but that might not be practical or feasible.
- pluc 26d ago> 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
- outside1234 26d agoLet's do intellectual property from books next!
- elonfboy 26d agolol oh no the plagiarism machine got plagiarized!
- jayde2767 26d agoHas anyone seen Pandora? I want to have a look inside that box she's been carrying around...it's time we start suing the pants off this "generative" stuff...
- mabini 25d ago[dead]
- outside1234 25d agoApple is essentially arguing that once an LLM system is tainted with IP that the whole system is tainted... <gets out popcorn>
- tw600040 25d agois it not?
- biggc 26d ago> 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.
- steveBK123 26d ago> I forgot to sign out of my personal Gmail Never, ever, ever sign into personal mail/messaging on work machines. Even the appearance of having done so just sets up for bad things. This was kinda iffy 20 years ago, now its crazy to do. We all have phones now, there's no good reason to do this.
- morkalork 26d agoHell, some employers are even helpful enough to block gmail, yahoo etc domains on their network.
- Muromec 25d agoI can't open pretty much anything, including shoghoth face and linked in, but thankfully this imageboard and YouTube are spared. I still wonder how the powers that be didn't bother to ban npm on dev machines
- mathisfun123 25d ago> Never, ever, ever sign into personal mail/messaging on work machines apple explicitly encourages their employees to do exactly this - it's called "carry"ing your work device.
- morganw 25d agoencourages, but doesn’t require. My work phone is an iPhone 14 that I only use for Slack notifications & to check the next day’s schedule when I don’t want to bother opening their laptop.
- happytoexplain 26d ago> 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." Yes. Yes, please make this argument, Apple. Some fascinating other conclusions follow from this.
- lobf 25d agoWhat are you referring to?
- unethical_ban 25d agoThat using AI to create derivative works of proprietary or copyrighted content would count as intellectual property theft.
- amelius 25d agoI'd love that, but that generalizes the argument, and it does not naturally follow that this is true.
- happytoexplain 25d agoIt doesn't strictly follow, but it very much naturally (or arguably) follows.
- lobf 25d agoThis is a trade secret, which is a very different category.
- deleted 25d ago[deleted]
- mnmnmn 25d ago[dead]
- lokar 25d agoCitadel had an employee take code, and had to use divers to recover it from a canal: https://www.businessinsider.com/yihao-ben-pu-citadel-2011-11 https://www.businessinsider.com/yihao-ben-pu-citadel-2011-11
- HolyLampshade 25d agoOne of the things I always told kids who came into these big trading firms is the owner(s) is/are a billionaire, and likely came up from one of the trading floors or something adjacent. They are not the “forgiving” types when it comes to shit like this, and they have infinitely more resources than you. So maybe don’t try to steal code, or trade concepts. Hasn’t stopped some people I know from trying… (For clarification I am not ex-CitSec and do not know this poor SOB, but he serves as the perfect poster child for “Don’t do that”)
- Marciplan 25d agothe amount of ads on this page oh lord
- psd1 25d agoTwo words: Fire. FoxReaderMode.
- ThePowerOfFuet 24d agouBlock Origin user here. What ads?
- MadrasThorn 25d agoI don't understand why this keeps happening
- kazinator 25d ago> 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.” But they've accepted the business model of taking works without permission for training AI; they need that to be fair use.
- fnord77 25d ago> 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. The warez want to to be free
- lrvick 25d agoIt is cute that anyone thinks intellectual property can be defended much longer. All intelligence will get folded into whichever models have the loosest restrictions on training on IP, and those models will become the smartest and most capable so everyone will use them. But also like, do not steal IP you could easily have re-created again. Those involved in this scheme were doubly idiots because they stole the IP in brazen ways that were easily traced back to them. Do people really not understand that every corporate laptop and server these days tracks -everything- you do? That corpo paycheck comes at a price of no privacy of any kind. California has protections on you owning whatever you can take in your brain and these days that is all anyone needs with LLMs being as powerful as they are.
- JumpCrisscross 25d ago> It is cute that anyone thinks intellectual property can be defended This is probably what Liu told himself before taking actions that will destroy his life.
- lrvick 24d agoI -exclusively- write and create FOSS without referencing anything proprietary. I do not want to use any tool anyone has any means to take away from me. I do not believe proprietary software should exist. With AI trending the way it is, I may get my wish.
- apatheticonion 25d agoI know it's unethical, but when I read this, I can't help but hope a pseudo-cleanroom/ai-laundered Linux GPU driver appears for MacBooks. What I wouldn't give to run Linux on my Apple hardware.
- brazukadev 25d agothat's not unethical at all.
- tomkarho 25d agoHow about Asahi? Or is your hardware too new for it to apply.
- apatheticonion 23d agoToo new, but my old M1 MacBook Pro runs Asahi and, while I love it and everything the team has done, it's not really daily drivable for work (due to a lack of external display support and other issues).
- pjmlp 23d agoAlternatively sponsor Linux friendly OEMs.
- irthomasthomas 25d agoMr. Liu boasted that for his work at OpenAI, he was "[f]eeling AI all day long," and that "[i]n the past hour," his AI "agent learned how to run LTspice and look at result, tune compensation parameter." (Id. ¶¶ 20-22.) He further explained that he ran these simulations, including with AI agents, for power conversion development work: "I try to make a behavior buck. With voltage outer and current inner. Everything ideal. It still took me a day.. now it's two hour. Including learning fresh." (Id. Ex. A (recipient of these messages responding, "Oh man! Why do they even need you then?" i.e., at OpenAI).)