There's got to be a ton of valuable workloads that don't care much about secrecy.

Who cares if someones spying on the process of fine tuning a model to help us pick strawberries? Even if they could somehow find a competitor to sell it to - the competitor wouldn't be interested because the risk of violating trade secret law is surely greater than whatever they can glean from our training run...

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crazygringo 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Exactly. I've recently been training a number of models, and the value to any potential competitor would be approximately zero.

It's so integrated with the specific inputs of my product, and the outputs that it needs, that the model just has no value to anyone else.

If a competitor needed such a model, they need to train their own that matches the form of their inputs and outputs, which is just going to be different.

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tgsovlerkhgsel 3 days ago | parent [-]

As long as your training data itself isn't sensitive. If that's e.g. photos of products and you're training a quality assurance photo recognition software, that's probably fine, if it's unredacted support tickets, not fine.

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woodson 3 days ago | parent [-]

You can process your data through some learned feature extractor offline first, just to be sure.

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jszymborski 3 days ago | parent [-]

I used to work at a company who used to do this, but I'd argue that it almost never does what you want re: concealing the input space. There are so many ways to recover the input space from the latents, and often they are constructed expressly to contain exactly enough information to do precisely that.

	▲	fc417fc802 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		But how much effort would that require? ... is what I was going to say but in this age of "claude reverse engineer this doohickey" maybe the better question is how much compute and how many tokens it would require.

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Aurornis 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Who cares if someones spying on the process of fine tuning a model to help us pick strawberries?

Privacy should be a default. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing.

It’s also unlikely they know what’s in the VMs until after they look at it.

	▲	tgsovlerkhgsel 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Sure, but if you have the option of training your strawberry picking model for 1/5th of the price knowing that you will be spied upon, that's probably still a good deal. Just like you can find all of my 3D models online because not being able to make them private is the price for the free license of Onshape, and I'm happy to let you look at those models rather than pay whatever a commercial license would cost.

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Phemist 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

IANAL, but it seems to me that to have something as a trade secret usually requires showing that the secret keeper put in significant effort to keep the thing a secret, usually there being some contract in place that defines the domain of knowledge that is considered a secret if the knowledge (i.e. models) need to be shared.

Uploading the models to an unscrupulous hosting provider where there was only some boilerplate terms of services agreed to.. would not seem to be that.

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behnamoh 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> a competitor to sell it to - the competitor wouldn't be interested because the risk of violating trade secret law is surely greater than whatever they can glean from our training run

Unless the competitor is in a country like China.

	▲	nyeah 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		>Unless the competitor is in a country like China. But how likely is that?

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vel0city 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Being careless in how you handle your corporate data will be evidence against your trade secret claims. You don't just get to claim anything as a trade secret, you need to actively go about trying to keep it a secret. Going with vendors who you know or had reason to believe were going to mishandle your "trade secrets" likely makes them no longer trade secrets.

Coca-Cola can't go dropping leaflets around with the recipe for Coca-Cola Classic and then claim the recipe is a trade secret.

IANAL. Talk to your own lawyer before you mishandle your data.

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elevation 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> violating trade secret law

There is law for patents. Trade secrets exist outside the realm of enforcement.

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polishTar 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

That's a common misunderstanding. If you learn of a trade secret through improper means, you can be liable federally under the DTSA or similar state statutes like CUTSA in California.

These were the statutes cited in the Anthony Levandowski lawsuit 9yrs back, where Uber settled for a 0.34% equity stake in their company.

	▲	close04 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		If you give away trade secrets by intentionally giving them to another party without an explicit agreement of secrecy no statute in the world will protect it. You have to take “reasonable” measures to protect trade secrets. Uploading them to a service without any confidentiality agreement or worse, where the provider officially has the right to use that data, defeats the definition of a reasonable measure.

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crazygringo 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Completely incorrect:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_secret#United_States

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gpm 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Trade secrets are protected by civil (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1836) and criminal law (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1832). There's a history of enforcement actions under both.