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.