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Apple reveals 'shocking evidence' from ex-employee's MacBook in OpenAI suit
- mnmnmn 15d ago[dead]
- lokar 15d 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 15d 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 15d agothe amount of ads on this page oh lord
- psd1 15d agoTwo words: Fire. FoxReaderMode.
- ThePowerOfFuet 14d agouBlock Origin user here. What ads?
- MadrasThorn 14d agoI don't understand why this keeps happening
- kazinator 15d 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 15d 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 15d 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 14d 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 14d 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 15d 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 15d agothat's not unethical at all.
- tomkarho 15d agoHow about Asahi? Or is your hardware too new for it to apply.
- apatheticonion 13d 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 13d agoAlternatively sponsor Linux friendly OEMs.
- irthomasthomas 15d 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).)
- xvxvx 15d 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.
- vasco 15d agoBased on all evidence so far Sam Altman has negative scruples so I'm pretty sure this would be incentivised if anything.
- jmclnx 15d 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 15d 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 15d 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 15d 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.
- dgellow 15d 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.
- Muromec 15d agoSounds like the LLM is equally good a participating in a criminal conspiracy and keeping notes on it. Not the team mate we all want, but one we deserve.
- aeternum 15d agoSounds like Apple might soon own some Jalapeño
- keeda 15d agoI think they'll settle for some of the sweet, sweet DRAM supply that Altman has locked up.
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 15d agoThat's a good macOS version name
- helsinkiandrew 15d ago> Liu said his AI “agent” learned to run LTspice and review the results. The irony if it was Fable/Mythos that when given a task, had discovered Liu had worked at Apple, hacked his laptop and used Apple data/IPR.
- snapetom 15d 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.
- karim79 15d 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 15d 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 15d agoIt's almost laughable how their behavior aligns with the "Scam Altman" snarky insult.
- microtherion 15d 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 15d 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 15d agoit doesn't seem like they want apple's ai secrets, they want apple's electrical engineering secrets for building physical devices
- blitzar 15d 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 15d agoI wonder how many times this has happened without anyone being caught.
- RodgerTheGreat 15d agoOr being caught, but without sufficiently rigorous evidence to take to court.
- tonyedgecombe 15d agoI wonder how much rope Apple gave these people to hang themselves with.
- Henchman21 14d agoThis feels like too much credit to Apple?
- joshka 15d 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.
- fantasizr 15d agothe fact that llms can spit out books they've been trained on near verbatim lends some credence to this.
- fantasizr 15d ago"However, we also find that Llama 3.1 70B memorizes some books, like Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and 1984, almost entirely. In fact, Harry Potter is so memorized that, using a seed prompt consisting of just the first line of chapter 1, we can deterministically generate the entire book near-verbatim. " https://reglab.stanford.edu/publications/extracting-memorized-pieces-of-copyrighted-books-from-open-weight-language-models/ https://reglab.stanford.edu/publications/extracting-memorize...
- keeda 15d agoA more important quote from that link: > With our specific experiments, we find that the largest LLMs don’t memorize most books–either in whole or in part. This technique has only ever been made to work with a vanishingly small number of extremely popular works, probably because they are so overrepresented in the training data set. The risk with IP, however, is a lot more grave. You may not even need to memorize the details of the IP verbatim, just the broad idea may be enough. It may lurk encoded in the weights forever, just waiting to be activated by the right prompt to start a chain of thought that unlocks further details. Heck, it may even appear as if the model suggested the idea itself.
- rjsw 15d agoA related argument could be whether the output of an LLM that has been trained on GPL code should also be considered to be under a GPL licence.
- pluc 15d 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
- qingcharles 15d agoLeopard ate my face.
- newtonapple 15d agoI'm not arguing for either side, but here's a fun thought experiment I've been thinking about a lot lately. If I learned things at one company, took my experience and memory to another company, and applied what I had learned there, am I technically stealing that company's secrets? What if I trained a team of agents to think and code like me at work, then exported those agentic skills and took them with me to another company? At what point would they still be considered the old company's property? Let's say I didn't take any code or proprietary information from the old company, just the coding style and best practices my agents learned from the old company's live metrics. Is that considered stealing from the company? Is that any different from me learning those patterns and skills personally and then reapplying them elsewhere?
- modeless 15d ago> If I learned things at one company, took my experience and memory to another company, and applied what I had learned there, am I technically stealing that company's secrets? The fact that California allows this to happen (banning non-competes and rejecting "inevitable disclosure") is exactly why Silicon Valley started here and remains here. It's exactly why ex-OpenAI people could start Anthropic. It's why neither OpenAI nor Anthropic have a monopoly on AI today. It's great both for employees and for the general public.
- biggc 15d 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.
- lozenge 15d agoI think I've heard about this before, apparently Apple encourages its employees to use the same iCloud account for personal and business use.
- deleted 15d ago[deleted]
- nozzlegear 15d agoYeah, from what I remember they have a funky iCloud file share thing set up for the whole company, and it requires them to either sign in with their personal iCloud account, or carry two iPhones (one for personal, one for work). Most employees understandably opt for the first option.
- slowin 15d ago> I hadn't considered that if I forgot to sign out of my personal Gmail on it that they could legally search that information I don't think this is true, this would still be unauthorized access on your employer's end and would be considered illegal. They're not allowed to pose as you to access your services iirc. You should obviously still sign out (or never sign in in the first place) of course!
- jubilanti 15d agoThese things all vary across legal jurisdictions and with what you sign away in your contracts. If your contract doesn't say anything, then yes, your boss opening up your laptop while you're on lunch and reading through your logged-in but password-protected personal e-mail is not just a civil violation but gets into CFAA/wiretapping territory. California has some particularly strong default protections. But you can 'freely' sign away these rights in your contract. Or if your contract binds you to follow internal policy and it's in the internal policy, that's usually enough notice and consent for the courts. When you're given a work device from a BigCo with a legal department that knows what they're doing, it usually comes with a EULA-style contract you don't read that authorizes everything. California law does now say you can't be forced to give your employer your personal e-mail or social login, or other way of scanning your personal e-mail or socials. You can't sign this right away (just like you can't sign away your right to a minimum wage or workplace safety), but if you freely sign in while on a company device, network, and time, and your contract or policy is worded so broadly that anything you do on that device/network/time is the company's...
- happytoexplain 15d 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 15d agoWhat are you referring to?
- unethical_ban 15d agoThat using AI to create derivative works of proprietary or copyrighted content would count as intellectual property theft.
- lobf 15d agoThis is a trade secret, which is a very different category.
- amelius 15d agoI'd love that, but that generalizes the argument, and it does not naturally follow that this is true.
- happytoexplain 15d agoIt doesn't strictly follow, but it very much naturally (or arguably) follows.
- deleted 15d ago[deleted]