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

    • 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.

          • Interaction data does not become training data, unless you want it to.

            I know that how a piece of software created using machine learning works, is an unknowable, but training data and interaction data are not the same thing. ChatGPT in particular is designed to be restored to a known good start state, only using query data for context awareness within a given sessions. Not to train itself.

            Each query simply includes all previous queries, for context. That's part of why it becomes increasingly erratic the longer a session goes on.

            And unless you do train with a given piece of data, that data is not entered into the LLM in any way. Not even the undefined unknowable way.

      • We're talking about very specialized engineering work,

        We're not though. This isn't a policy preventing them from disclosing them from talking about specific company IP (which is almost certainly covered by existing NDAs already). This prevents them from using it internally at all.

        I use ChatGPT at work all the time, usually for getting very specific information about products I have to integrate with, quickly parsing new API documentation, and learning about unfamiliar processes at a conceptual level before I have to dive deeper for a project. It's more the context around which I'll be building the specialized IP. It's the sort of stuff I can learn via Googling (or sometimes Stack Exchange), but can learn it faster in a more targeted manner by asking detailed questions to the chatbot.

        • This prevents them from using it internally at all

          That's because it's too easy to accidentally feed it information you shouldn't.

          Everyone working at big companies knows very well they must not talk about company's stuff outside of it, but it's too easy to underestimate how much info you actually give up with queries you think might be "innocent" ones.

    • 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.

    • Not sure if you actually read the article.. But it's about the concern of what happens with the information/code that is used as input, and the potential leaks.

    • I agree with your sentiment if the tech were self-hosted, but there are huge security risks to pasting sensitive internal content into a third party took

      • That depends on what kind of agreement exists between your company, and that of the third party tool. Yes, in the worst case, the answer is "none".

        But most workflows involve quite a lot of third party tools, only they are all licensed, and with clear details worked out for what data can go where.

        That employees are using such tools without there being a proper deal... Is a temporary problem to which a ban is not the solution.

40 comments