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.
Openai and their loyals absolutely use bots to change public opinion. There has been a massive psyop campaign ever since the DOD contract that they signed.
Absolutely. I don’t know how strong their case is or isn’t, BUT if you hire Jony Ive and a bunch of Apple device people in order to build something that is a threat to the “Apple tax” revenue machine, they are coming after you without a doubt.
I may be ignorant on the matter, maybe they've done that kind of thing before.
>according to OpenAI
The most juvenile "press release" I've ever seen a company post on purpose isn't the strongest evidence against them, though. Forgive me if I take everything OpenAI say with an ocean's worth of salt.
"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?
Maybe GitHub? It’s not a “cloud repository”, but possibly referring to that. And I can see how “an authentication bug” could be due to their corp Apple account being disabled, but still somehow being able to log into GitHub.
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.
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...
If you watch any 2000s comedy film, or just do a high level skim of 2000s pop culture, that was a very standard trendy attire back then. My parents were into me looking like that in school at the time as well + for photos.
I am quite sure long sleeve Tee under a band t-shirt will eventually make a come back, given all the nostalgia wave from Gen Z, experiencing their grandfathers teenage years.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Actually we really unironically do want it to be exactly like that. I don’t care if every negative externality claimed to happen happens tenfold as a result. Even 1/10th of the claimed positive externalities makes it so worth it.
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.
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?
Also likely a healthy dose of confidence that they wouldn't get caught (seemingly overconfidence, but I suppose maybe they were just extremely unlucky)
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
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.
You need a lot of money to retire in a beach house in California and have your own small yacht and fly private. And buy concierge healthcare and get your kids into the top schools.
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.
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.
It is a step up from the old Siri as it can answer any question, yet again you have to say Hey Siri for each follow up question. This is especially true when driving where i use voice tech the most.
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!
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
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…"
These companies (e.g., Intel, Google, etc.) also had to compensate their employees as a part of the settlement. Especially for people in engineering orgs, many of them received decent settlement checks.
The amount was dependent on their seniority and a lot of people received bigger checks. Regardless, we can all argue if any amount was sufficient to compensate for limiting peoples' movement among these companies back then....
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?
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 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.
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.
Unions primarily benefit the weakest workers, and in places like SV, usually the top workers already are getting fat plates and others are pushing hard to get there.
Think of it like a football club holding a vote to flatten player pay. The benchwarmers will be falling over themselves to unionize, and the top players will be looking where to move too.
This is why union efforts fail, which many find perplexing. The most valuable players get better deals negotiating without a union.
Interesting point. I think there might be something special about sag given the way Hollywood does business. Everyone switches employers constantly as projects spin up and wind down. Having a mostly permanent role in an organization is super unusual - and I wonder if these roles (like a 20 year soaps gig or the simpson’s) have different stats on working on/off the card.
> Interesting point. I think there might be something special about sag given the way Hollywood does business. Everyone switches employers constantly as projects spin up and wind down. Having a mostly permanent role in an organization is super unusual […]
And yet all the major US sports have player associations/unions with minimum salaries. The players are hardly constantly switching, and when they do switch it's often not their own choice but rather their employer/team trading them.
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.
Eh, the kind of poaching OpenAI is accused of doing here is not normal recruiting. It is being claimed that they are giving specific instructions to exfiltrate Apple’s proprietary info & trade secrets.
I know, hence why I pointed out the very important difference between those two things.
I wouldn't describe this as "poaching." What OpenAI is accused of doing is industrial espionage and IP theft. It did this as part of hiring somebody away from another company, which is commonly (and IMO incorrectly) described as "poaching." But the problem isn't the "poaching," it's the theft. If they'd "poached" without the theft it would be fine. If they'd found a way to steal IP without hiring anyone it would still be bad.
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.
OpenAI did not launch any hardware (yet), and I don't think their IPO pricing hinges on them launching an iPhone competitor. To me, it looks like Apple wants to launch a similar AI hardware and is slowing-down the competition to be the first-to-market.
Funny thing: they are barking at the wrong tree here.
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.
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 [shareholder] earnings.
One of the most pernicious and harmful lies of the past 50 years.
Management is obliged to act in shareholders' interests. Executives are paid in stock. Maximizing earnings makes the stock price go up, which makes executives more money personally. So they're happy to let everyone believe they are legally required to make the stock price go up.
There is no law or court precedent making it illegal for management to de-prioritize short-term profit as long as they aren't hurting the shareholders interests and advancing their own.
Yes, but also the "executives are paid in stock" by certain people. If the stock price goes up, of course the executive equity will be worth more, but also if the executives make the certain people happy, the certain people can increase and otherwise adjust the amount of stock. So the stock price can be much about maximizing those very large shareholding certain people. That the price also changes the value of the exec equity is a thing, but the package is straightforwardly modulated as needed whether the price is high or low.
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.
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.
I don’t see how this is the case? The CEO can absolutely tell the board to shove it. The board can’t micromanage the CEO - they don’t have the levers to do that. So their options are few, and pretty much all nuclear along the lines of firing the CEO. Is the Apple board going to fire Tim Cook for making iPhones accessible? If they did, they’d find themselves fired by the shareholders.
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.
Please 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
> Apple is doing it right, simple high level statements.
OpenAI is acting like a teenager posting screenshots of literal texts and being overall petulant.
Or you know, another perspective: Apple filed a very public lawsuit with some very explosive allegations, and OpenAI responded with receipts showing some of those allegations to be rooted in Apple's own incompetence. Sure, many more allegations are still unaddressed, but based on these screenshots a neutral observer could realistically question those too.
> This is open and shut. The mature company will win this.
This is not OpenAI's first rodeo so we actually have precedent: Elon filed a similarly explosive lawsuit, OpenAI responded similarly with receipts, and guess who won that case: https://openai.com/index/openai-elon-musk/
Apple is outright going for corporate espionage claims. They can also fall back to the CFAA and push for criminal prosecution of former employees individually.
Despite being based on a Musk tantrum it made it all the way to a jury trial, where Elon lost. Apple can sue over a lot of things, but seeing these chat messages and incompetent lawyer outreach does raise the possibility that this is based on an Apple tantrum as well. Which is exactly what OpenAI is implying.
Apple asked for expedited discovery, I guess you could say OpenAI obliged ;-)
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?
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.
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 ?
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".
> 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.
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 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 :).
I have moved between clients (as a contractor) within the same industry every couple of years for nearly two decades, often cycling back around to the same clients more than once.
There have also been cases where a previous client kept my contract open after I had left and started with the next client. This gets disclosed to the new client, and my previous client gets informed of where I’m moving to so they have the option of immediately closing the contract if they feel there is a conflict that cannot be managed.
None of this is hard. It simply requires transparency and not doing dumb or nefarious things.
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.
Yep a lot of this falls under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act which can lead to criminal prosecution of an individual.
You lost access officially when you left the employer. Just because you still had some vestige credential that _could_ let you see old employer data does not mean you are legally entitled to use it.
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 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.
This is one of those times where I wonder if I'm a genius for knowing not to generate evidence of a crime by talking about it in recorded media, or if we're just seeing the bottom 5% of wrongdoers.
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.
> 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.
OpenAI 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.
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.
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.
There may be real misconduct here, but "some employees mishandled confidential information" and "OpenAI must stop developing AI hardware" are very different claims
15 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.
Many 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'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.
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.
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").
So they get a special Apple metal shine on their unknown hardware device (I guess some sort of Siri BS gadget or similar) and this somehow represents some sort of existential IP threat to Apple? I don't like OpenAI and Sam Altman (seems sketchy as f although the Anthropic guy is in the running to beat him). But this just seem ridiculous. So either there is more to this story that we are not being told or it's just a fishing expedition on Apples part to get force discovery.
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...
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.
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.
