> these are letters to individuals about the existing lawsuit with OpenAI, not new lawsuits against individuals
My guess is these employees weren’t chosen randomly. If they refuse to coöperate with Apple, they’ll get personally sued as well.
And the reality of the matter is, given Altman’s public persona and reputation, there is a good chance an AG somewhere starts looking at whether these folks broke any laws.
They will find out what Altman really cares about, my guess at this point, he only cares about the impending IPO throwing baggage overboard (new hires), probably won’t be a problem in the end.
Definitely not randomly chosen--Apple would have chosen people it believes may have evidence that relates to the case. It's a legal request to preserve that data.
But it doesn't follow at all that Apple is threatening to sue them. A long time ago, in an unrelated case, I got a letter like this because I was in the room when a certain decision was made and happened to have some notes about that meeting. But there was no chance I would be sued. I wasn't the decider, and was basically a third-party involved.
They can easily be found to have violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, like this is a slam dunk. Highly possible too seeing the massive public hatred against companies like OpenAI. DAs like easy political wins too and what better win than sticking it to OpenAI and its lackeys?
Might have to make some phone calls to my local representatives now...
Yeah I trust nothing. I listened to a hubermanlab podcast and found myself using AI to take a first pass at verifying claims he was making, but everything he suggested was complete bull crap.
My company doesnt even let people use AI -- at least not agents (it's recently got blocked because someone learned about all the security team learned about all the vulnerabilities going around a few months ago [eyeroll]. I hired 3 developers in the last year and didn't mention AI in the job posting at all (it wasn't intentially left off... it's just that it has nothing to do with what you'll be doing, one of your goals, or related to driving business outcomes... its just a tool you can use if you want to [and it's unblocked by the corporate overlords]). So... there are companies out there. All the person is trying to say is making broad statements like that there's 0% of companies willing to prioritize quality/craftsmanship/maintainability (if that is the trade off... which is yet to be seen) over velocity. There obviously are places like that out there or there are entire companies or individual teams that prioritize that because the developer culture prioritizes that. Every team and situation is different.
