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…"
The term make it sounds like a good thing, however I do not know if this was really a net positive. It might have helped the companies but isn't this anti-competitive at the employee level?
I might be wrong but that's the impression I get when talking with US people about unions and workers rights.
Think of it like a football club holding a vote to flatten player pay. The benchwarmers will be falling over themselves to unionize, and the top players will be looking where to move too.
This is why union efforts fail, which many find perplexing. The most valuable players get better deals negotiating without a union.
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.
I read into these PR blasts, lawsuits that Apple is sour about losing employees to higher salary opportunities, and is likely using lawsuits instead of higher salaries to retain them.
You're not though, legally anyway. Courts will generally not second-guess a board's business decisions so long as the board acted in "good faith" even if that decision results in loss for shareholders, or does something that does not maximize their returns.
Board just has to link the decision and the long term health of the company. But it's just that, health of the company which is legally distinct from the health or short-term desires of individual shareholders and investors.
Sometimes I think it’s time to give shareholder supremacy a rest. If they don’t like what they own, they can sell it. But this is probably also why I’m not on a board of directors.
> “When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don’t consider the bloody ROI,” Cook said. “If you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get out of this stock.”
That was back in 2014.
But I do agree, it's time to normalize telling shareholders where they can shove it. If they don't like it, they can sell.
This is not true. Fiduciary responsibility does not mean "maximize earnings". This one fiction has done more damage in the name of unfettered capitalism than anything else.
Sure. Also, don't care. Lets focus on the devil currently doing harm.
That’s a brave look
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Brennan-Jobs
But how is he doing at the 'ranting and yelling tirades at his staff' metric? That's also a known characteristic of Jobs.
But he made good products that most people like to use. That was GP they were getting at with "he wants to be Steve Jobs."
You don't need to hamfist that into the conversation every times Jobs' name comes up.
The mythologising of some really bad people got us here.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Here is New York: https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/PEN/140.20
I don't know exactly what legal technicalities are involved, but this did actually happen to me in a de facto sense!
The one containing his children, only the nanny goes there.
Money, ideology, coercion, and ego.
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
Or maybe word gets around locally or for special research positions.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
Today... Who cares? Lol. I'm not convinced there's anything going on at Apple, secret or otherwise, that we would find particularly interesting.
"he took advantage of an authentication bug to gain access to Apple’s confidential third-party cloud repository to download at least thirty-seven highly sensitive and proprietary technical documents related to, among other things, Apple’s hardware technologies and research and development."
Anybody know what they mean by "third party" ? Who provides Apple internal employees with a cloud repository?
Both sides should learn to remain silent and work the case through legal channels.
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.
More to OP's points, Apple made legal filings. OpenAI is penning blog posts.
But it's extremely harmful when there isn't.
"Alice says murder is bad, while Bob says murder is a fun and healthy recreational activity. Trying to see validity in each point of view is a virtue, not a vice." See, it doesn't work.
In the case of Apple and OpenAI, since that's actually what we're talking about: why is it wrong to suggest that there may be validity to each other's points of view, especially given that we don't have all the facts?
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.
It's 2026; we can probably update "pound the table" to "pound social media"
The media is happy to stoke the flames.
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.
Why? Apple surely doesn't want to and why should they?
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?
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 :).
> [...] 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".
A good company also doesn’t want you to take IP bc it creates the liability.
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 might as well do the same just to be able to filter out candidates willing to do that.
And laughing about the possibility of copying data doesn’t necessarily mean anything was actually copied.
And in the end the know-how is in the people, so whatever apple has it getting out anyway when people leave.
More recently there was Nuvia, which the lawsuit was dropped, and Rivos, which was settled.
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.
It seems to have played out decently in courts so far.
But that is not the claim, and no one is even pretending that that's what happened.
My post was more of a joke, how "AI training" is now a get-out-of-jail free card.
With the corruption so blatant and on public display now, and with how much the labs have been trying to sell "too big to fail" to the government, the standard rules no longer apply when it comes to anything involving these labs.
"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.
No it can't. I've worked for a bunch of tech companies large and small and interviewed for way more, and I have literally never seen this.
What Apple is alleging is not normal at all, nor is your interview experience. I've literally never even heard of anything like you describe, presenting architecture diagrams of your previous work? That's such a huge red flag, and these companies are opening themselves up to similar lawsuits. The fact that you describe multiple companies requesting this is genuinely shocking to me.
There has to be more to this story. Do you have anything substantial that you could share?
I suspect their security “lapses” are more along the lines of “give them enough rope to thoroughly hang themselves”
The idea that it is a drag on productivity is self evidently wrong based on results.
Compaction and dynamic granularity encoding only abstract the Micky Mouse trademarked logo lurking in almost every model. =3
You seem to want to be precise, so you should probably use a different term than 'stealing'. It, by definition, is not the correct term.
A Trademark is considered intellectual property. It is theft, and Disney could still drop a boot on the industry. Similar works found in high-dimension vector search spaces also do not escape legal peril in copyright similarity cases.
Perhaps some conflated the methodology of training and use of generative mechanisms with the legal interpretation of "uncopyrightable" output in commercial settings. =3
The implication being at least some of this is to do with OpenAI making consumer hardware, as designed by Ives.
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.
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.
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.
"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
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.
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.
I do not know whether this lines up with the claims of stolen files.
The second part reads to me like they asked some company to perform a special metal finishing, knowing that they perform similar work for Apple.
I am no lawyer and I do not understand what is proprietary to Apple here, it just does not sound that big a deal to me.
Now that is a charitable reading. Maybe OpenAI ruthlessly stole Apple's trade secrets. I do not know.
The special technique is the IP. In hardware manufacturing, the process is the IP and can be considered a trade secret, so even if that supplier does metal finishing for a ton of different clients, Apple's specific "recipe" or whatever is a legally protected trade secret, they would not be allowed to do it for anyone else.
Apple is alleging a little more than going and asking the supplier to do it though, in the lawsuit they are alleging the former employee leveraged their own relationship with the supplier to present the request as if Apple had approved it (to use their wording "Misleading the partner to believe they had Apple's permission to do so").
Apple is retarded in that they encourage their employees to use their personal iCloud credentials while working there and make it very difficult for employees to request a serrate work phone. It is tremendously idiotic from a security standpoint and is not the way virtually any other big firm does things.
As a Google employee I can’t imagine them compelling me to use a personal Gmail account for anything.
Moreover, although we can use personal Android devices, most orgs make it easy for employees to get a separate work phone. To the degree they allow personal android devices, this is only because Google has done significant work to allow for an isolated “work” profile with an entirely different email address / login. Because iPhone lacks this feature, corporate access on those devices is heavily curtailed.
I somehow doubt the Apple board has been made aware of these shenanigans and abhorrent security posture.
It's always employer neglecting workers and then having pikachu face.