> Apple alleges that Liu ran a simulation in March using the circuit schematic file in LTspice, an electrical engineering tool. In messages from around that time, Liu said his AI “agent” learned to run LTspice and review the results.
"I didn't steal it, I fed it to an agent who then fed it back to me".
> Apple argues that when trade secret information is fed into an AI agent or model that learns from it, that learning “may create irreversible and continually propagating uses of the trade secret.
Has anyone seen Pandora? I want to have a look inside that box she's been carrying around...it's time we start suing the pants off this "generative" stuff...
> Apple argues that when trade secret information is fed into an AI agent or model that learns from it, that learning “may create irreversible and continually propagating uses of the trade secret.”
This is somewhat of a high impact argument to test. I wonder if the case will eventually get to working this point out.
There's already some precedent when dealing with humans reverse engineering systems. We use "cleanroom" approaches where the ones doing the reverse engineering are segregated from those doing the later design and development work. Instead of producing a design document based on the thing being studied, the reverse engineers produce a specification from which a new design, untainted by knowledge of the original design, is produced.
People using ML to try and reverse-engineer and create a "clean" version of things will likely need to use a similar approach. You can't ask one LLM to take in a circuit design as input and produce a specification and design within the same context. The resulting design will be at least partially informed by knowledge of the original design. The way to do this safely (potentially still with suits happening, but safer at least) will be to have one execution to produce a specification, and a second fresh execution taking the specification to produce a design. At least then you know your LLM was not aware of the original design.
Of course, LLM agents "cheat", so you'll also want to be careful to ensure a clean environment if you're using an agent that does not provide access to the original design material.
If the LLM designs the circuit, it is clear "contamination" if the tool calls which wrote the RTL / Verilog are also in the same context window as the specification design.
If a windows DLL, distributed without a license that says anything regarding, is it a "clean room implementation" if there is some nonzero chance the source code was leaked into the weights at pre-train time? I guess there should be some sort of method for subpoenaing frontier labs to ask "can you grep for this code in the training set for this model", but that might not be practical or feasible.
> If the LLM designs the circuit, it is clear "contamination" if the tool calls which wrote the RTL / Verilog are also in the same context window as the specification design.
You can't ensure it properly segregates its knowledge so it's a legal risk. If you believe your LLM can generate a design from a spec without knowledge of the original, why would you take that unnecessary risk? A lot of the behavior in this area is meant to avoid the appearance of impropriety, because the appearance of impropriety forces you to defend and demonstrate there was none.
If you isolate the two behaviors (reverse engineer design to spec; convert spec to new design) then you have a legal defense. You can claim that any coincidentally too similar design elements are a consequence of standard design patterns or something, not a consequence of inherent knowledge of the original design.
This is why we separate the people into distinct roles, there's no reason not to do the same (or expect the same) with machines. If you don't want the legal cover, of course, by all means take the risk and enjoy a trillion dollar company taking you to court.
> Additionally, Apple learned about Liu’s use of the schematic because he used it on a Mac mini which later synced via iCloud to the MacBook he took from Apple. Apple now also wants access to that Mac mini.
I'm very curious about the privacy implications of this. I know that anything I do and store on my company's laptop can be tracked, but I hadn't considered that if I forgot to sign out of my personal Gmail on it that they could legally search that information.
The files syncing to the company laptop's disk is a layer of nuance that makes this situation tricky to evaluate.
- Mr. Liu not only downloaded a confidential Apple circuit schematic but also used it in his work at OpenAI;
- Far from his unauthorized access to Apple’s third-party cloud storage being unknown to him, Mr. Liu and others at OpenAI were well-aware of that access;
- Mr. Liu, upon learning of Apple’s internal investigation of him, sent instructions for destroying evidence to an OpenAI colleague who confirmed she would comply; and
- Mr. Liu used a tool in his work at OpenAI that has the same name as an internal Apple engineering application used for Apple development work.
Good lord. Smart people doing the dumbest things with their work equipment.
I have a former coworker who was the VP of Finance at my company. He suddenly got fired out of the blue. The company was in the midst of trying to find a buyer (this was announced) so this was extra surprising. Turns out, he knew a lot of bad news about the company, and they caught him looking for a job. They fired him because he was too much of a liability.
How did they catch him? He was putting resumes and cover letters on OneDrive. "Yeah, in retrospect, that's one of the dumber things I've ever done," he said to me later.
Reminds me of the story of an ex-Coca-Cola employee who offered to sell the secret recipe to Pepsi. Pepsi immediately let Coca-Cola know and it was handled. Not a good look for OpenAI. They come off as desperate and unprofessional.
Funny to imagine that food scientists at these companies must have cracked these recipes decades ago, and the secrecy might now only serve as a loyalty test for the uninitiated in the food and beverage guild.
That's because pepsi already had coca-cola's secret recipe. I'm sure if they didn't have it already they would have been more than happy to at least have some knowledge before reporting it, but not like they didn't have the talent, money or technology to reverse engineer it at least a decade ago at that point.
No, it's because Pepsi isn't trying to be Coke, they're trying to be better than Coke. So having the recipe is kind of moot.
Even if they were to take the recipe and publish it for all to see, you would still need all of the other machinery that is Coca-Cola to make Coca-Cola.
And then you have issues of quality. Coca-Cola has certain standards, it's not a guarantee that everyone else will have those same standards. Like, people buy the expensive brand of milk despite all milk being the same. It's one ingredient. With quality standards given by the government. There is really no room for interpretation.
Not really OpenAI but today's society. I say this started with the "just do it and ask for forgiveness later" attitude that started maybe 20 or 30 years ago.
At one time most people had respect, even people at the top, now many people just do what they want. Plus most of the time they get away with it.
is what the entire LLM industry is based on. They swallowed up all of society’s copyrighted texts without really asking for permission from anyone. This is just par for the course for them it seems unfortunately.
> Peer pressure and community sanctions of bad actors will result in the changes we need.
It's been demonstrated over centuries that this is unreliable. We end up needing a third party (commonly governments) to step in and establish rules and referee behavior. We wouldn't have an EPA, FCC, SEC, or many other organizations and laws if private actors could successfully police themselves.
Happened at a (large) company I worked for in the past. A devops guy stole the DB ahead of going to work with a rival, he was caught and the rival of course wanted nothing to do with it. I'm not sure of his fate but it couldn't have been much fun.
Happens occasionally at big corporations, even the bloodsucking vampire. Best to distance yourself from such employees - lest they will do to you what they have done to others.
The difference is, relative to OpenAi they have standards and morals.
A mature organization does not want the liability and if contacted by previous employer with evidence of these kinds of allegations, immediately gives said employees the boot.
> Apple argues that when trade secret information is fed into an AI agent or model that learns from it, that learning "may create irreversible and continually propagating uses of the trade secret."
Yes. Yes, please make this argument, Apple. Some fascinating other conclusions follow from this.
> Apple alleges that Liu ran a simulation in March using the circuit schematic file in LTspice, an electrical engineering tool. In messages from around that time, Liu said his AI “agent” learned to run LTspice and review the results.
"I didn't steal it, I fed it to an agent who then fed it back to me".
> Apple argues that when trade secret information is fed into an AI agent or model that learns from it, that learning “may create irreversible and continually propagating uses of the trade secret.
Ok I'm hooked
Let's do intellectual property from books next!
lol oh no the plagiarism machine got plagiarized!
Has anyone seen Pandora? I want to have a look inside that box she's been carrying around...it's time we start suing the pants off this "generative" stuff...
Apple is essentially arguing that once an LLM system is tainted with IP that the whole system is tainted...
<gets out popcorn>
> Apple argues that when trade secret information is fed into an AI agent or model that learns from it, that learning “may create irreversible and continually propagating uses of the trade secret.”
This is somewhat of a high impact argument to test. I wonder if the case will eventually get to working this point out.
There's already some precedent when dealing with humans reverse engineering systems. We use "cleanroom" approaches where the ones doing the reverse engineering are segregated from those doing the later design and development work. Instead of producing a design document based on the thing being studied, the reverse engineers produce a specification from which a new design, untainted by knowledge of the original design, is produced.
People using ML to try and reverse-engineer and create a "clean" version of things will likely need to use a similar approach. You can't ask one LLM to take in a circuit design as input and produce a specification and design within the same context. The resulting design will be at least partially informed by knowledge of the original design. The way to do this safely (potentially still with suits happening, but safer at least) will be to have one execution to produce a specification, and a second fresh execution taking the specification to produce a design. At least then you know your LLM was not aware of the original design.
Of course, LLM agents "cheat", so you'll also want to be careful to ensure a clean environment if you're using an agent that does not provide access to the original design material.
question to clarify:
If the LLM designs the circuit, it is clear "contamination" if the tool calls which wrote the RTL / Verilog are also in the same context window as the specification design.
If a windows DLL, distributed without a license that says anything regarding, is it a "clean room implementation" if there is some nonzero chance the source code was leaked into the weights at pre-train time? I guess there should be some sort of method for subpoenaing frontier labs to ask "can you grep for this code in the training set for this model", but that might not be practical or feasible.
> If the LLM designs the circuit, it is clear "contamination" if the tool calls which wrote the RTL / Verilog are also in the same context window as the specification design.
You can't ensure it properly segregates its knowledge so it's a legal risk. If you believe your LLM can generate a design from a spec without knowledge of the original, why would you take that unnecessary risk? A lot of the behavior in this area is meant to avoid the appearance of impropriety, because the appearance of impropriety forces you to defend and demonstrate there was none.
If you isolate the two behaviors (reverse engineer design to spec; convert spec to new design) then you have a legal defense. You can claim that any coincidentally too similar design elements are a consequence of standard design patterns or something, not a consequence of inherent knowledge of the original design.
This is why we separate the people into distinct roles, there's no reason not to do the same (or expect the same) with machines. If you don't want the legal cover, of course, by all means take the risk and enjoy a trillion dollar company taking you to court.
> Additionally, Apple learned about Liu’s use of the schematic because he used it on a Mac mini which later synced via iCloud to the MacBook he took from Apple. Apple now also wants access to that Mac mini.
I'm very curious about the privacy implications of this. I know that anything I do and store on my company's laptop can be tracked, but I hadn't considered that if I forgot to sign out of my personal Gmail on it that they could legally search that information.
The files syncing to the company laptop's disk is a layer of nuance that makes this situation tricky to evaluate.
> I forgot to sign out of my personal Gmail
Never, ever, ever sign into personal mail/messaging on work machines. Even the appearance of having done so just sets up for bad things.
This was kinda iffy 20 years ago, now its crazy to do. We all have phones now, there's no good reason to do this.
Hell, some employers are even helpful enough to block gmail, yahoo etc domains on their network.
I think I've heard about this before, apparently Apple encourages its employees to use the same iCloud account for personal and business use.
The claims:
- Mr. Liu not only downloaded a confidential Apple circuit schematic but also used it in his work at OpenAI;
- Far from his unauthorized access to Apple’s third-party cloud storage being unknown to him, Mr. Liu and others at OpenAI were well-aware of that access;
- Mr. Liu, upon learning of Apple’s internal investigation of him, sent instructions for destroying evidence to an OpenAI colleague who confirmed she would comply; and
- Mr. Liu used a tool in his work at OpenAI that has the same name as an internal Apple engineering application used for Apple development work.
Good lord. Smart people doing the dumbest things with their work equipment.
I have a former coworker who was the VP of Finance at my company. He suddenly got fired out of the blue. The company was in the midst of trying to find a buyer (this was announced) so this was extra surprising. Turns out, he knew a lot of bad news about the company, and they caught him looking for a job. They fired him because he was too much of a liability.
How did they catch him? He was putting resumes and cover letters on OneDrive. "Yeah, in retrospect, that's one of the dumber things I've ever done," he said to me later.
Reminds me of the story of an ex-Coca-Cola employee who offered to sell the secret recipe to Pepsi. Pepsi immediately let Coca-Cola know and it was handled. Not a good look for OpenAI. They come off as desperate and unprofessional.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2006/jul/07/marketingandpr... - I had only vague memories of this, but here's an article from the time about it.
Funny to imagine that food scientists at these companies must have cracked these recipes decades ago, and the secrecy might now only serve as a loyalty test for the uninitiated in the food and beverage guild.
That's because pepsi already had coca-cola's secret recipe. I'm sure if they didn't have it already they would have been more than happy to at least have some knowledge before reporting it, but not like they didn't have the talent, money or technology to reverse engineer it at least a decade ago at that point.
No, it's because Pepsi isn't trying to be Coke, they're trying to be better than Coke. So having the recipe is kind of moot.
Even if they were to take the recipe and publish it for all to see, you would still need all of the other machinery that is Coca-Cola to make Coca-Cola.
And then you have issues of quality. Coca-Cola has certain standards, it's not a guarantee that everyone else will have those same standards. Like, people buy the expensive brand of milk despite all milk being the same. It's one ingredient. With quality standards given by the government. There is really no room for interpretation.
Not really OpenAI but today's society. I say this started with the "just do it and ask for forgiveness later" attitude that started maybe 20 or 30 years ago.
At one time most people had respect, even people at the top, now many people just do what they want. Plus most of the time they get away with it.
One could make the argument that
"just do it and ask for forgiveness later"
is what the entire LLM industry is based on. They swallowed up all of society’s copyrighted texts without really asking for permission from anyone. This is just par for the course for them it seems unfortunately.
Well the asking for forgiveness part is also missing in this case, entirely.
It's actually forbidden, by advice of legal counsel, because in court the other side would present it as evidence of knowing culpability.
We can fix this by holding each other accountable. Peer pressure and community sanctions of bad actors will result in the changes we need.
> Peer pressure and community sanctions of bad actors will result in the changes we need.
It's been demonstrated over centuries that this is unreliable. We end up needing a third party (commonly governments) to step in and establish rules and referee behavior. We wouldn't have an EPA, FCC, SEC, or many other organizations and laws if private actors could successfully police themselves.
Guessing you haven't take the HR training - thats not allowed anymore.
Happened at a (large) company I worked for in the past. A devops guy stole the DB ahead of going to work with a rival, he was caught and the rival of course wanted nothing to do with it. I'm not sure of his fate but it couldn't have been much fun.
> the rival of course wanted nothing to do with it
The key difference here seems to be that OpenAI very much wants something to do with it.
Happens occasionally at big corporations, even the bloodsucking vampire. Best to distance yourself from such employees - lest they will do to you what they have done to others.
The difference is, relative to OpenAi they have standards and morals.
A mature organization does not want the liability and if contacted by previous employer with evidence of these kinds of allegations, immediately gives said employees the boot.
I suppose we only hear about the cases where the perpetrator was too stupid to learn about opsec beforehand.
> Apple argues that when trade secret information is fed into an AI agent or model that learns from it, that learning "may create irreversible and continually propagating uses of the trade secret."
Yes. Yes, please make this argument, Apple. Some fascinating other conclusions follow from this.
I wonder how many times this has happened without anyone being caught.
Or being caught, but without sufficiently rigorous evidence to take to court.
[delayed]