> 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.
Wait until you hear who we elected president...
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 Just because someone found a loophole or grabbed files before their access was revoked doesn't make it legal (under trade secrets law).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.
Do not try this at homes that belong to other people.
No it doesnt, that's still breaking and entering
Ha this is the logic Richard Chase used to enter peoples homes
lmao you dumbass
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.
I’m kind of horrified that he has children.
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.
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.
Disgusting to think about honestly, no integrity.
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.
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.
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!
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
“It’s your fault we stole your trade secrets”