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…"
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…"
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.
Apple was the ringleader in the illegal anti-poaching agreements between SV companies a couple decades ago.
Also: https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-google-others-...
cutthroat vs blatantly breaking the laws and manipulating employees to break laws ...
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.
> 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!"
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?"
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 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...
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.
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.
Disgusting to think about honestly, no integrity.
People break the law for pennies all the time
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.
> 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.
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.
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!
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.
“It’s your fault we stole your trade secrets”
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.
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.
Nah , OpenAI doing it right , defending its interest and valuable employee with both legal and public from competing company negative oppinion.
The lady doth protest too much, methinks
"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.
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.
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...
Seems to be Altman's playbook, just like how he got the CEO job back.
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.
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.
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.
It's not hard if you are honest
These guys are pushing boundaries knowingly.
A good company also doesn’t want you to take IP bc it creates the liability.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A few of my colleagues were fired for including source code derived from Apple specifications in their Copilot session (yes we use Copilot).
Does it matter? As long as the data is in the 1st brain and can be taken outside and used as a skill.
Apple is historically successfully secretive.
I suspect their security “lapses” are more along the lines of “give them enough rope to thoroughly hang themselves”
Why do think they would want to be vindictive? The point is to prevent leaks, leaving lapses is exactly counter to that goal.
That secretive culture died over a decade ago. Everything gets leaked now.
A lot of the legal action is a warning to current employees who may have been considering doing the same.
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 on earth does this opinion have to do with anything?
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.
this reads like a blind comment
Well with OpenAI saying strongly the opposite now they can’t both be right. Someone is lying through their teeth here.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Yes