Apple bans use of ChatGPT internally

Felemuso@feddit.de to Technology@lemmy.ml – 11 points –
Apple bans use of ChatGPT internally
theregister.com
15

Decisions like this just prove how massive the market for a self-hostable alternative is. They're not banning it because it's a bad tool, they're banning it because they're concerned about what happens to the source code their engineers paste into it.

There are already a bunch of OSS attempts, and it likely won't take long until we have something of comparable quality to ChatGPT is available for companies to host on their own hardware.

Companies are also banning ChatGPT because its unclear from where the code it spits out was stolen and how it’s licensed. Copy and pasting code from AI tools is an enormous legal risk for a software company.

Well of course, ChatGPT has already leaked Samsung Semiconductor's internal information earlier, and Apple is infamous for being secretive about their design.

How to neuter your own ability to compete: ban your workers from using the latest tool for boosting employee performance.

Frankly, if not using chatgpt reduces your peformance significantly I wouldn't want to work with you. It would mean that you're not doing much more than copy and pasting random search results into the project and don't spend any time validating, vetting or testing them. Chatgpt is just a new interface to already existing data.

Then you don't have much faith for your co-workers competence in wielding any given tool to its greatest utility. Using an LLM like ChatGPT to access data hardly automatically means you're also a brain-dead search result copy-paster.

Yes, its a new interface for existing data, the same way digital files are to data on paper. Only ever using the latter is really inefficient, and stupid in a world where the digital files exist. Not that the hardcopies cant be to their own utility, or be used as corroborating data.

It's a really good interface, if you know how to use it. This is like banning search engines because you expect your workers to be expert at everything, so they shouldn't need support tools to sleuth for data.

This is like banning search engines because you expect your workers to be expert at everything,

More like banning your engineers from discussing their work with third parties. If you feed chatgpt the same queries that you would feed to a search engine you're probably not using it optimally.

Frankly, if ChatGPT isn't increasing your performance significantly, you're already falling behind the curve unless you're doing manual labor.

Better stop using xerox machines to make copies and write everything out by hand

You could argue the same thing about using google. Yet you use google.

Leaking industry secrets is a much bigger concern that boosting productivity a little bit.

We're talking about very specialized engineering work, it's not something you can totally rely on a bot to do, though it might help sometimes, it's fully understandable for specialized companies to want to ban GPT internally, until there's a way for them to host a totally internal one.

On this I agree entirely. The potential for corporate espionage because of unwitting employees using an LLM through unofficial means is huge.

At the very least, the corporation itself would have to be the customer, so that watertight terms might be negotiated, not the employee.

I don't think being a customer would work either, language models are still on the training, noone knows exactly how users queries are used, that's a big no no for every company having to protect their secrets.

A self-hosted instance is a much better solution, if not the only "safe" one from that point of view, we'll get there.

It's a MASSIVE security risk. What you tell ChatGPT is not private, if you knowingly or unknowingly tell ChatGPT secret information you have no control over where that information may go. Especially for a company for Apple that lives & breaths on surprise product releases.