I think they'll settle for some of the sweet, sweet DRAM supply that Altman has locked up.

I am constantly dumb founded at the people who conduct deeply personal business on a company laptop. Some individuals do not even own their own computer. Has every job hunt they have pursued has been done on their previous employers equipment?

A coworker of mine once answered the wrong cell phone and said the wrong company name. (He was working for a competitor as well as our company.)

Another turned his computer that “wouldn’t behave” into IT, full of porn.

To paraphrase the sage Jimmy McMillan: the number of people who interview on their work laptops is too damn high. I'm always flabbergasted when they admit this and not once has somebody who did so passed. IME there's a strong correlation between good judgment and technical prowess in this regard but I suppose stories like this prove me wrong.

being dodgy is hard work. it takes effort to maintain and the longer you maintain it the cumulatively harder it is to get away with.

We have a plague here in NZ of top-level Police officers using work-issued devices to access and store CSAM material.

> 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.

I have seen Claude literally suggest using a Sonnet sub agent to read source the main agent shouldn't, and have the sub agent describe the "facts and ideas" via markdown to the parent agent thereby maintaining that it is clean room and not, for example, GPL encumbered.

This seems as acceptable as asking a human to do the same. Otherwise, taken to its logical conclusion, if any LLM was trained on GPL software, it cannot be used for non-GPL authoring (and IIUC Claude does offer indemnity for enterprise plans if this is challenged).

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.

"However, we also find that Llama 3.1 70B memorizes some books, like Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and 1984, almost entirely. In fact, Harry Potter is so memorized that, using a seed prompt consisting of just the first line of chapter 1, we can deterministically generate the entire book near-verbatim. "

https://reglab.stanford.edu/publications/extracting-memorize...

> Never, ever, ever sign into personal mail/messaging on work machines

apple explicitly encourages their employees to do exactly this - it's called "carry"ing your work device.

you're not wrong, but its really annoying carrying 2 laptops and 2 phones and 2 charging bricks [0].

Especially when work picks out the 16.2" laptop for you.

[0] - Yes, I know there are 3rd party multi-port USB-C charging products, but the wattage isn't as high as having 2 different bricks.

Hell, some employers are even helpful enough to block gmail, yahoo etc domains on their network.

I was under the impression that Apple requires its employees to login with personal Apple ID accounts for cloud storage.

> “You go through these steps of getting all your software set up, and all your devices provisioned to access internal Apple networks, and things like that. And it explicitly says you cannot use your corporate Apple account to set this up.”

https://cybersecurityventures.com/does-apple-spy-on-its-empl...

There is a difference between judge signed warrant and nosy CISO or HR person having feelings. A whole world of difference

These things all vary across legal jurisdictions and with what you sign away in your contracts. If your contract doesn't say anything, then yes, your boss opening up your laptop while you're on lunch and reading through your logged-in but password-protected personal e-mail is not just a civil violation but gets into CFAA/wiretapping territory. California has some particularly strong default protections.

But you can 'freely' sign away these rights in your contract. Or if your contract binds you to follow internal policy and it's in the internal policy, that's usually enough notice and consent for the courts. When you're given a work device from a BigCo with a legal department that knows what they're doing, it usually comes with a EULA-style contract you don't read that authorizes everything.

California law does now say you can't be forced to give your employer your personal e-mail or social login, or other way of scanning your personal e-mail or socials. You can't sign this right away (just like you can't sign away your right to a minimum wage or workplace safety), but if you freely sign in while on a company device, network, and time, and your contract or policy is worded so broadly that anything you do on that device/network/time is the company's...

Yeah, from what I remember they have a funky iCloud file share thing set up for the whole company, and it requires them to either sign in with their personal iCloud account, or carry two iPhones (one for personal, one for work). Most employees understandably opt for the first option.

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.

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.

We can fix this by holding each other accountable. Peer pressure and community sanctions of bad actors will result in the changes we need.

There doesn't have to be any meaningful analogy here. Laws don't have to treat humans and machines equally. Laws are for people and allow things that are less than ideal, but necessary for people to function.

Humans can't leave their old brains at their previous employer, can't delete their experience learned on proprietary data. It wouldn't make sense for the law to fight this.

But the law can control what can be done with information stored outside of your brain.

Your training of a team of agents is a product you developed while working for that company and would be owned by them. You could in theory train a new team of agents after leaving the company, but it could not be trained on anything that isn't in your brain. If you gave it anything, like the old company's live metrics, then you'd be stealing trade secrets. The key difference from you personally learning those skills is that an agent trained on company data turns personal knowledge into a portable, structured artifact, which crosses from "your skill" into something that looks a lot more like company property.

I don't understand the point of your question. The "problem" of an ex-employee consciously or subconsciously bringing his learned experiences at your company to a competitor is literally the reason why non-competes exist. In fact, this topic is quite old.

> If I learned things at one company, took my experience and memory to another company, and applied what I had learned there, am I technically stealing that company's secrets?

The fact that California allows this to happen (banning non-competes and rejecting "inevitable disclosure") is exactly why Silicon Valley started here and remains here. It's exactly why ex-OpenAI people could start Anthropic. It's why neither OpenAI nor Anthropic have a monopoly on AI today. It's great both for employees and for the general public.

> At what point would they still be considered the old company's property?

It depends on your contracts (aka NDAs). Sometimes employers do ban for that very same reason from joining a competitor(s) for x years from date of separation

The difference is you’re a human with the right to self.

> If I learned things at one company, took my experience and memory to another company, and applied what I had learned there, am I technically stealing that company's secrets?

Human brains are in many ways privileged agents in a legal and copyright system, because it exists to serve the needs of humans.

Artifacts produced by human brains are not.

You’ve just described how consulting works

lol oh no the plagiarism machine got plagiarized!

That might be the most embarrassing implication for OpenAI out of the whole affair: That OpenAI, supposedly one of the vanguards in AI, saw a need to appropriate intellectual property of Apple, supposedly a complete laggard in that field.

It's almost laughable how their behavior aligns with the "Scam Altman" snarky insult.

In this case there is a big chance he was hired by OpenAI because of that - or even was asked to do it.

That using AI to create derivative works of proprietary or copyrighted content would count as intellectual property theft.

I wonder how much rope Apple gave these people to hang themselves with.