- 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.
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.
The key difference here seems to be that OpenAI very much wants something to do with it.
The difference is, relative to OpenAi they have standards and morals.
This is somewhat of a high impact argument to test. I wonder if the case will eventually get to working this point out.
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.
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.
"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
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.
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.
Yes. Yes, please make this argument, Apple. Some fascinating other conclusions follow from this.
xvxvx•58m ago
jmclnx•49m 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•46m ago
Jtsummers•44m ago
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.
blitzar•42m ago
ViktorRay•45m ago
"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.
baxtr•27m ago
everybodyknows•8m ago
Jtsummers•48m ago
asdff•39m ago
himata4113•28m ago
bena•2m ago
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.