Based on the previous thread, Apple seems to have damning evidence of wrongdoing by the (ex)employees before-and-after they left their positions at Apple: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48865019
Seems very similar to Google/Waymo winning its case against Uber (ex-Googler Anthony Levandowski) stealing corporate data.
Apple has the employees' emails history, the server access logs, etc. Really don't see Apple pursuing this unless they had a mountain of evidence against them.
Depending on what is at stake. Example the one with Nuvia and Qualcomm I believe they just settled.
This could actually be the fuckup that kills OpenAI as an independent company. The threat of a cash judgement gums up not only an IPO, but also debt-based fundraising. (We equity guys are idiots, so we’ll probably keep writing cheques until the market turns.)
This could go way beyond any potential hardware project, depending on whats actually true from the allegations and how much of Apple's trade secrets have been used or shared within OpenAI.
There were rumors a while back of OpenAI building some integrations into macOS akin to the Shortcuts app, and who knows what other computer use type projects. They could very well have been using information from within Apple for that.
It's kind of a fruit of a poisonous tree problem. If OpenAI used any of Apple's secrets broadly, Apple could ask the court for an injunction to block the deployment of any software from OpenAI. If discovery proves the IP contamination spread into other areas within OpenAI, it could completely freeze all of their deployments.
If Apple actually has the receipts here they could realistically bring down OpenAI entirely.
I find this so funny. Can you share an example or two of where something like this has ever happened to one of the largest companies in the world? There is no universe where some judge orders that OpenAI can no longer deploy any software, for anyone (including huge swaths of the federal government) because of the alleged actions of a few people, and it’s allowed to stand. Zero chance.
I’ll say one thing for Sama: he might have a lot of haters, but it’s not that hard to prove them wrong with predictions like these.
My prediction: this will result in a relatively modest undisclosed settlement and OpenAI won’t abandon, or even modify, their hardware product because of this. And Apple definitely won’t get an “open kimono” to everything OpenAI has planned.
This is two of the largest, most powerful, most well-capitalized companies on the planet in a legal fight. People are taking sides because of their hatred of Sama, and it results in these bizarro takes that OpenAI is finished as a company lol.
Guess we’ll see.
Huh what? Since when is OpenAI's IOU's and paper money worth more than Apple's cold hard cash? They have been backing away from their infrastructure commitments and literally pushing their IPO out.
Their "value" might fly with idiot VC's that are willing to throw money at them based on vibes. They are "big" on paper, nothing close to the financial heft of Apple. If anything this is where Sam Altman’s reality-distortion-field isn't going to fly.
> ... it results in these bizarro takes that OpenAI is finished as a company lol.
Meanwhile there's repeated news of OpenAI barely making ends meet and poised to run out of money mid next year. Unfortunately, OpenAI being 'well-capitalized' just doesn't hold up to what we've been actively seeing.
I wonder if they’ll be the Lehman Brothers of this bubble
That's exactly what this Yahoo Finance article today calls them at least [1]
[1]: https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/lehman-brot...
Also, they don't have a directly competing business with OpenAI, so slander doesn't make sense.
I think this is genuine.
Apple already caught former employees accessing the Apple internal network with unreturned laptops after termination that’s pretty much game over.
If Apple has receipts, this could spell the end of OpenAI anyway. Even if Apple doesn't go to trial, at minimum, OpenAI will need to discard any work that even remotely touched or was influenced by Apple's IP here. If it was shared broadly within OpenAI across multiple projects, it could be quite substantial. Fruit of a poisonous tree and all that.
In the not-so-distant past, Uber's head of self-driving was indicted and sentenced to jail time for similar conduct. The criminal case didn't start until ~2.5 years after the civil case was filed.