Apple says more ex-employees may have taken confidential data to OpenAI
techcrunch.com258 points by thewebguyd 5 hours ago
258 points by thewebguyd 5 hours ago
Apple 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…"
Apple was the ringleader in the illegal anti-poaching agreements between SV companies a couple decades ago.
> anti-poaching
The term make it sounds like a good thing, however I do not know if this was really a net positive. It might have helped the companies but isn't this anti-competitive at the employee level?
Yes and they got in huge trouble for it. It was a massive scandal. The only reason Apple wasn’t made an example of was because all the other big companies followed suit and did the same thing. It was Steve Jobs that drove this monopolistic behavior that could have turned out much worse for Apple.
It was mass-collusion between big companies to prevent people from exercising labour mobility. Poaching is illegal, i.e. theft from an individual or the crown; we shouldn't encourage treating people like company property.
yes, which is why Apple got massively fined for doing it -- nowhere near enough to compensate all the depressed engineering salaries though.
And successfully at the time (illegally) squashed unionization efforts by software engineers
I think that's just standard across the US. But the unions are a people problem not a company problem necessarily. People can still form unions even with massive investments to squash them.. Europe has proven that. But the story told to all US workers SEEMS to be, you have to suffer and grind to make money.
I might be wrong but that's the impression I get when talking with US people about unions and workers rights.
If Silicon Valley had unions, employee stock options would end. And along with it, most of the incentive structure that drives innovation in the valley.
If Tony and Steve were friends, that's not Apple being cutthroat. Cue: the chapter about poaching from friends in Ben Horowitz's The Hard Thing About Hard Things. If you cross that line and poach from your friends, expect to hear about it. Another example: https://www.reddit.com/r/EntrepreneurRideAlong/comments/1jgz...
It's worse. "Cutthroat" implies being ruthless but legitimate. So-called "poaching" is completely moral and legal, whereas trying to get others not to "poach" "your" employees is immoral and illegal.
There's a bright, clear line between targeted attempts to hire someone who has a job working for a competitor, and trying to get that person to take confidential information with them when they switch jobs. The latter is wrong and will rightfully result in legal action. The former is perfectly fine, and good for employees, which I'd wager still includes most of this site's audience despite the startup-founder focus.
Remember, employers don't own the people who work for them. They cannot be "poached." They can only be given a better offer. If your employee decides they'd be better off working for your competitor instead, then you have only yourself to blame for not giving them enough incentive to stay. Either up your game, or give them a friendly goodbye.
Tony Fadell is an alleged notorious toxic personality. I wouldn't use him as a an example.
It's not alleged, it's sadly confirmed. There's been comments on HN over the years from people who have worked under him.
I'm no OpenAI apologist here, but I appreciate this perspective. Apple definitely played their timing right for maximum pre-IPO damage. It gives them tremendous negotiating leverage on a possible settlement which could give them a chunk of OpenAI.
I think it's notable that Apple is vague about what was actually stolen and what OpenAI has actually received.
I read into these PR blasts, lawsuits that Apple is sour about losing employees to higher salary opportunities, and is likely using lawsuits instead of higher salaries to retain them.
How is it notable? Apple’s complaint is that these are corporate secrets. If it wasn’t secret, there would be no case.
Jobs had something to prove though. He was kicked out, brought back, he definitely wanted to ensure his legacy. But while I don't agree with it, I think it's harder to be an ethical company that makes it to a billion than a non ethical one. When shareholders are involved you don't have a choice really.. You're obliged to maximize their earnings.
> You're obliged to maximize their earnings.
You're not though, legally anyway. Courts will generally not second-guess a board's business decisions so long as the board acted in "good faith" even if that decision results in loss for shareholders, or does something that does not maximize their returns.
Board just has to link the decision and the long term health of the company. But it's just that, health of the company which is legally distinct from the health or short-term desires of individual shareholders and investors.
Maybe a court won't, but there are lots of examples where activist investors have forced the CEO or board members out with a campaign focused on short(er) term results. And Wallstreet is notorious for only giving a public company 2 quarters to get anything done.
> You're obliged to maximize their earnings.
Sometimes I think it’s time to give shareholder supremacy a rest. If they don’t like what they own, they can sell it. But this is probably also why I’m not on a board of directors.
Interestingly enough, Apple at one point had that attitude even under Cook.
> “When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don’t consider the bloody ROI,” Cook said. “If you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get out of this stock.”
That was back in 2014.
But I do agree, it's time to normalize telling shareholders where they can shove it. If they don't like it, they can sell.
Ironically (and perversely) it's much easier to do this with exotic cap tables that keep voting rights and ownership effectively split. You needed a very valuable company to make this work and the most obvious example (Meta) is not exactly a beacon of corporate governance.
> You're obliged to maximize their earnings.
This is not true. Fiduciary responsibility does not mean "maximize earnings". This one fiction has done more damage in the name of unfettered capitalism than anything else.
> Apple is cutthroat in business too.
Sure. Also, don't care. Lets focus on the devil currently doing harm.
cutthroat vs blatantly breaking the laws and manipulating employees to break laws ...
This 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/. 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.
Tangentially related, but I was rewatching the old iPhone 3G keynote recently, and you wouldn't believe who made an appearance.
Wow red polo with a green polo underneath and double popped collars
That’s a brave look
Did you mean puzzling look? Why is he wearing 2 shirts? In the 90's we would wear a long sleeve Tee under a band t-shirt, but we didn't wear multiple t-shirts...
I wonder why so many ex apple followed this particular path of Kool Aid? or maybe this says more about how the rank and file are just as susceptible to kool aid as any average Silicon Valley schmuck
The slurping of the kool-aid is not limited to SV. I've seen it at a couple of companies I've worked at in the past. Both were media/post type of studios where one you've probably heard of before and the other probably not. They both had employees that had their tongues stained the color of the kool-aid they drank. Seeing people wearing the SWAG shirts and hats of the company they work for in the office is just so cringe to me.
I'm not a huge fan of my old company, but they had great fitted & soft T-shirts. I wish I had more...
I don't think it's Kool-Aid, I think it's "Apple has notoriously low salaries for a FAANG and OpenAI will probably have a trillion-dollar IPO". You can see right through Altman's charade and still want to work for him for equity.
If he really wants to be Steve Jobs he needs to get a woman pregnant the 'traditional' way and then abandon his child, but later proceed to name an expensive product after the child. Which I don't think is on the table as an option for Altman.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Brennan-Jobs
But how is he doing at the 'ranting and yelling tirades at his staff' metric? That's also a known characteristic of Jobs.
IMO it's not a outrage/apologist thing anymore, just played out and irrelevant. There are so many current problems that we don't need to dig up things about Jobs - or defend him. Let's fix-forward.
We 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.
Altman has far worse issues, considering his alleged actions towards his sister.
No need to be disrespectful.
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Why do you focus on the dead and not on the living who have done as bad?
You can, and should, do both.
The mythologising of some really bad people got us here.
A 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.
If 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.
> 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?
The outcome shouldn't depend whether they had "poor" security anyway. If I leave my front door locked, it might increase the chances I get robbed, but it doesn't make robbing me legal.
It just goes to show how Saltman thinks. "If the door is open, it's not my fault I've walked in and stolen all of your stuff!"
He's credibly accused of raping his sister.
So, it tracks that he has rapist mentality.
Sure, but this is about IP law instead of physical goods.
This is like if you left your door wide open, and a neighbor peaked in and told another neighbor about your decor or what posters are on the walls.
You didn’t lose anything tangible, but something you wanted to be secret isn’t anymore. Where the balance of blame falls is up to you, but I do think to some degree that if you want to keep a secret and can’t put in the bare minimum effort to even try to protect it then you own some of the blame.
The difference is there's no laws around your home decor, but there is a clear legal framework around trade secrets. Apple's allegation is that a vulnerability was exploited to access some of the data as well which, if true, carries potential CFAA criminal charges.
For trade secrets, it only requires "reasonable measures" even just having an NDA is enough, even if the rest of your security is wide open. Just because someone found a loophole or grabbed files before their access was revoked doesn't make it legal (under trade secrets law).
Almost certainly the employees at some point in their tenure at apple signed some duty of confidentiality, or some acceptable use policy, etc. which is grounds enough for illegal misappropriation. "You didn't lock down their access enough" isn't a valid legal defense.
There are absolutely laws about IP theft. That's why it's called Intellectual Property.
You really don't want the law to be "Well you didn't lose a physical thing, so why should it be illegal?"
> You really don't want the law to be "Well you didn't lose a physical thing, so why should it be illegal?"
There are people who feel this way, so it's possible that the parent comment does actually want it to be this. You're 100% correct that this doesn't describe the law right now though, which is what actually matters for this lawsuit.
It isn't ever quite that simple. It also depends whether that person only used information that is publicly available to deduce how to do it at the new company.
Having access doesn't mean you are allowed to access something. Let's say I started working at a new company and notice I can still access the source code at my old company. This doesn't mean I am allowed to download it and give it to my new employer even if we just use it as a reference.
It's more like if you left your door unlocked, and I hire somebody to break into your house and make copies of documents you left sitting on the counter. They discover that the door is unlocked so their job is real easy, hooray! Doesn't matter, still very illegal, and both I and the person I hired should be prosecuted for it.
It makes breaking and entering legal because no breaking to enter happens. It allows people to move in and squatting is now in play so they could lock you out and call police if you try to enter.
No. Unlocked door != legal entry. "Breaking" in B&E doesn't require any physical damage. Pushing open an unlocked door or entering a place without authorization counts. If I leave my home to go to the store, and leave the door unlocked and someone walks in, they are still committing a crime.
There are also no tenant protections for criminal intruders, squatter protections require a claim of right like a disputed lease or a holdover tenancy, or continuous possession over many years. Someone that just walks into a residence is an active trespasser and can be arrested for criminal trespass or burglary.
This is not how it works. Even a cursory glance at the law makes it clear that this is not how it works.
Here is New York: https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/PEN/140.20
Funny enough, I had some valuable stuff (including my passport!) stolen from my car, which I'd left unlocked because I was moving some heavy boxes. The police in my area (bay area) said they couldn't really do anything about it because they didn't break a window.
I don't know exactly what legal technicalities are involved, but this did actually happen to me in a de facto sense!
That's cops being lazy because they now don't need to write a report for your car insurance to replace the non-broken window. However, your homeowners or renters insurance may cover the stolen items. In general, there's probably nothing to do about stolen items from a car because literally anyone could have done it and it's not like your car was a sterile environment to begin with (millions of fingerprints and pieces of random DNA everywhere). To give them the benefit of the doubt, why should they expel manpower and resources over items that your insurance will replace when those resources could be put to use in investigating violent crimes? Although in reality, even with photographic evidence and location tracking of the stolen items, the cops still probably won't do anything other than write a report unless it's a very slow day.
Yeah, what this anecdote actually proves is that there's no legal protection against the cops just deciding not to do their jobs.
The supreme court doubly proved that again recently ruling that the police have no specific duty to protect individuals or even respond for that matter.
That’s like saying it’s not manslaughter if you kill a woman because no ”man” died.
Laws around breaking and entering date back to WELL before mechanical locks were commonplace or even affordable to residences.
If your best defense is "it was easy" you're probably not in a legally great position...
> is there any glass house he won't go to?
The one containing his children, only the nanny goes there.
Ah, probably why he thinks its such a great idea to have ChatGPT make a podcast about your children to listen to instead of, you know, talking to them.
That 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?
"Why do people do these things"
Money, ideology, coercion, and ego.
Also likely a healthy dose of confidence that they wouldn't get caught (seemingly overconfidence, but I suppose maybe they were just extremely unlucky)
They probably were presented with huge comp packages which made bending ethics incredibly easy.
Unless its enough money to retire, I just don't understand people doing it for money.
Even then, I don't really understand the logic, because it seems like that doesn't take into account the risks and magnitude of the downside. The downside of losing a lot of money from lawsuits or even potentially going to jail is pretty huge, and I don't see how to make the expected value come out positive when any more money beyond "I can safely retire immediately" honestly wouldn't make my life significantly happier.
All this is moot of course because I'm weird and don't have any desire to make money from things I don't consider ethical even if I knew for sure I could get away with it, but I can at least understand other people not feeling constrained in that way (or not finding this particular thing unethical, since from a lot of these threads it's clear that the idea of "trade secret" as something legally protected is not universally popular). This crime in particular just doesn't seem like a smart one to do even for people who don't mind the idea of making money from it.
Some industries (e.g. law) are close knit, at the top level everyone knows everyone, you’d get blacklisted for pulling stuff like this.
But tech isn’t like that, there’s always a new startup and a new VC firm that don’t care that you ripped off every single previous person you worked with, stole trade secrets… maybe this time will be different
In the hiring process for tech, is it common to have a background check that unearths your mishandling of trade secrets?
Or maybe word gets around locally or for special research positions.
Not that I've done a ton of hiring, but no, that hasn't been common anywhere I've worked. The tech world is huge, it's easy to go somewhere else, outside of whatever bubble of people you've burned in the past, and start again.
When you’re in these circles there is pressure to earn even more money (which is part of the employee retention plan). There is always someone richer. There is always a property you would like to buy.
People break the law for pennies all the time
Sure, and when they do it for stuff where they're at risk of getting caught, it's confusing too. I'm not particularly motivated by money, which makes it pretty easy for me to not have any desire to take risks like breaking the law for money, but I can at least comprehend that for some people who are more motivated by money compared to other things, there might be some crimes where the risk/reward ratio ends up making it appealing. What I never understand is people doing crimes when the likelihood and magnitude of the risk are both so high compared to the actual upside if you manage to get away with it. I can't imagine they're making enough money from this to make it a worthwhile risk, so it's not clear where the cognitive dissonance is. Do they think that OpenAI is going to be so rich and powerful in the future that their gratitude will pay off even more in the long run? Are they way overconfident that they can pull it off without consequences? I can't even begin to wrap my head around any of the scenarios individually, much less have any insight into which one they bought into.
There are comp packages in the millions for people (often a large part can be in a lump sum bonus as well).
Future 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…
I 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.
Maybe Apple will buy Open AI at a rock bottom price after this lawsuit.
I've used chatGPT voice conversation tech since Sept 2023 and was expecting the new Siri to match the user experience. The new Siri is far far away from matching chatGPT's voice tech. The new Siri is smarter and can now answer your question for anything yet it's SLOWer and you can not have a full conversation with it. I continually have to say "Hey Siri," to continue the conversation on my iPhone 15 Pro Max. Yet with the chatGPT app I can have a full conversation making me think Open AI's voice conversation tech is light years ahead of the new Siri.
You aren't supposed to have a full conversation with Siri, it's an assistant not a chatbot. Tell it to do a task, and it does the task. In those leaked system prompts/instructions Apple pretty explicitly wants to avoid conversational engagement to stop the whole "AI friendship" crap from happening.
I can get a lot done in the car talking to chatGPT where i use voice conversation the most. I do not use it for an AI friend but as a voice assistant who can get things done for me quicker then picking up my phone in the car, when it's across the room, when i dont want to pick up my phone and etc, etc.
Apple is working now on a slew of devices focused on voice as Open AI (Space X is purportedly working on an AI focused phone / device) too. Thus, I had anticipated Siri to match the same experience of GPT.
You’ve got to realize that you’re comparing a server farm running gpt to a model running for most things locally, on the oldest phone that supports it. It’s as close to apples to oranges as you can really get, yet I’d argue the Siri ai revamp is pretty impressive given these considerations.
I cannot imagine there is any value in OpenAI for Apple. They don’t need to own an AI lab, they can rely on open source for free and fine tune to their need. But really, so far what makes Apple great is that they *have not* pushed for AI in everything!
Because chatGPT can get away with listening to you all the time, but if Siri does that without it being explicitly prompted it will be a class action
Well Apple is building a slew of AI voice devices, Open AI is too and purportedly so is Space X creating an AI focused phone.
We'll see if consumers embrace it, but ive been using chatGPT's voice conversation tech since Sept 2023 especially while driving to get things done. For me it feels like the next natural UX Internet usage paradigm.
In 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.
Yup - 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
Saw 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?
Could 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?
It'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...
I 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.
The 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.
Can 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?
I 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 :).
Ehmm... offering "consulting" should come with a contract specifying scope of work, data/device access, and expectations.
I agree it feels scary from the employee's perspective, but at least in this case, it doesn't seem like it would've been difficult to avoid: simply return your work devices when handing in your badge:
> [...] multiple former Apple employees now working at OpenAI reached out to discuss returning Apple-issued work devices they kept when they left Apple.
By not doing that you effectively just cry "sue me", this is stupidity on the employee's part (or malice). Oh and maybe don't take "screenshots of confidential documents".
Return your work devices immediately upon leaving. Don't even attempt to access any internal systems or accounts you previously had access to. It's real easy to avoid this sort of trouble.
These guys are pushing boundaries knowingly.
A good company also doesn’t want you to take IP bc it creates the liability.
I really think this is apple feeling really threatened rather than confidential data really being stolen.
Apple is known for threatening companies that hire from them, and occasionally having secret agreements with other companies not to hire from each other.
People move from a company to a direct competitor all the time (i have a number of friends that went from working at aws to working on gcloud for example) and guess what, no one of those companies really went bankrupt due to this.
So really long story short: i think apple is being a sore loser at the employee retention game.
I don’t know where you’re drawing your conclusions from but they literally have messages from the OpenAI exec laughing at how he can still access data at Apple and talking about copying it, as well as messages encouraging candidates from Apple to bring unreleased prototype hardware to demonstrate during interviews.
I thought those were just allegations they made in the lawsuit, not necessarily something they had written evidence of in the form of messages.
Which in fairness should be blamed on the candidates, not on the company.
I might as well do the same just to be able to filter out candidates willing to do that.
And laughing about the possibility of copying data doesn’t necessarily mean anything was actually copied.
And in the end the know-how is in the people, so whatever apple has it getting out anyway when people leave.
Yeah Apple does have a history of doing these things. There was Palm, where Jobs told them if they didn't stop recruiting Apple employees he would destroy Palm with patent lawsuits. Jobs was also one of the main architects behind the no poach cartel in SV between Google, Adobe, and Intel, and Apple.
More recently there was Nuvia, which the lawsuit was dropped, and Rivos, which was settled.
People in silicon valley do this every day. California has a lot of laws to protect employees. Companies need tangible proof of a violation, not just "this guy had vague company IP in his head".
> 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.
Really 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.
Why are you both-sidesing this?
Apple is doing it right, simple high level statements.
OpenAI is acting like a teenager posting screenshots of literal texts and being overall petulant.
This is open and shut. The mature company will win this.
> Apple is doing it right, simple high level statements
More to OP's points, Apple made legal filings. OpenAI is penning blog posts.
Looking at things from multiple perspectives and trying to see validity in each point of view is a virtue, not a vice. I really hate that "both-sides" has become a copy-paste insult by ideologues.
It's a virtue when there is validity to both sides.
But it's extremely harmful when there isn't.
"Alice says murder is bad, while Bob says murder is a fun and healthy recreational activity. Trying to see validity in each point of view is a virtue, not a vice." See, it doesn't work.
The point is you need to TRY in order to have a chance of finding validity. No one is talking about murder here, which a pretty trite counterexample.
In the case of Apple and OpenAI, since that's actually what we're talking about: why is it wrong to suggest that there may be validity to each other's points of view, especially given that we don't have all the facts?
"Apple is doing it right, simple high level statements."
Apple does this to most any company that ends up with any of its former employees. It's basically expected. Apple is being the bully.
Nah , OpenAI doing it right , defending its interest and valuable employee with both legal and public from competing company negative oppinion.
This, 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.
"If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts; if you have the law on your side, pound the law; if you have neither, pound the table."
It's 2026; we can probably update "pound the table" to "pound social media"
The whole affair and the blog post feels like proxy signal to potential investors from OpenAI that they have now developed/acquired tech that is worth enough to grab Apple's attention ?
I mean, they are dealing with it in the courts, right? This is the press picking up on public court filings https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/73602437/49/apple-inc-v...
It'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.
> 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.
>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?
Huh? Apple is literally working through legal channels, the article is pulled from the court filings which are public record. OpenAI is the one making blog posts.
I 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.
If 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.
The 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.
It'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.
When 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.
> 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.
You'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.
The allegation is that OpenAI explicitly requested that people bring and explain actual prototypes ("show and tell"), and downloading files from iCloud Drive after quitting Apple to join OpenAI. What you're describing is not even remotely on this level.
You're making assumptions that aren't supported if you read the actual lawsuit.
A few of my colleagues were fired for including source code derived from Apple specifications in their Copilot session (yes we use Copilot).
What’s the speculation about what leaked? Are we talking about next-gen on-device neural accelerators or something along those lines?
One 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.
AI seems to always be stealing from someone
Please don't assume the entire AI industry behaves like OpenAI
Isomorphic 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
>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.
stealing: "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
Apple is historically successfully secretive.
I suspect their security “lapses” are more along the lines of “give them enough rope to thoroughly hang themselves”
A lot of the legal action is a warning to current employees who may have been considering doing the same.
Apple is large. People free stronger allegiance to their cultural and ethnic groups than their companies. They just don’t want to get in trouble.
Why do think they would want to be vindictive? The point is to prevent leaks, leaving lapses is exactly counter to that goal.
Apple 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.
What 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.
Bring back Scott Forstall and get rid of half the employees at Apple. Time to clean house, they’ve lost their innovation and hunger.
What was so great about Scott Forstall?
A 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.
Does it matter? As long as the data is in the 1st brain and can be taken outside and used as a skill.
Well with OpenAI saying strongly the opposite now they can’t both be right. Someone is lying through their teeth here.
I 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.
OpenAI has been talking about making hardware for a while now, and most likely they are going to attempt a smartphone.
I mean do they need any of this for that. All of it is in the software anyway and the Android stack is there already.
From 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.
I 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.
> 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.
The special technique is the IP. In hardware manufacturing, the process is the IP and can be considered a trade secret, so even if that supplier does metal finishing for a ton of different clients, Apple's specific "recipe" or whatever is a legally protected trade secret, they would not be allowed to do it for anyone else.
Apple is alleging a little more than going and asking the supplier to do it though, in the lawsuit they are alleging the former employee leveraged their own relationship with the supplier to present the request as if Apple had approved it (to use their wording "Misleading the partner to believe they had Apple's permission to do so").
OpenAIs response:
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.
This 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.
Tech 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.
Tech company drama *not on the front page.
This has been front page material for multiple non-tech media outlets.
Though I don’t know how much I would believe that this is them trying to taint a jury pool.
It’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.
> 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
yeah 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.
I 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.
Wow. This makes Apple seem like amateur hour. The case should be dismissed with prejudice.
Does 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.
This 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.
At 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.
Scam Altman.
What 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.
Yes