A federal judge is making OpenAI open up its hiring files. U.S. District Judge Edward Davila on Tuesday partly granted Apple's request for expedited discovery in its trade secrets suit against OpenAI, io Products and two former Apple employees, Chang Liu and Tang Yew Tan. Tan is now OpenAI's chief hardware officer.
OpenAI has to hand over the documents it used to interview Apple candidates for its consumer hardware and robotics groups, including checklists, guides and scripts, plus any Technical Deep Dive presentations summarizing those interviews or referencing Apple technology or parts. Apple also gets the forensic images the defendants already collected and every LINE message between Liu and OpenAI's Alyssa Peng since January 1. Anything already collected is due in five days, the rest in 14. Liu, Tan and Peng have to sit for depositions, and so do corporate reps from OpenAI and io.
The interview records matter most. Apple's complaint says ex-Apple staff at OpenAI coached people still at Apple on what to bring to their interviews. Davila also pointed to a conversation in which Liu and Peng discussed restoring their Apple-owned devices, and called Apple's worry about evidence getting lost or overwritten "well-taken."
Apple didn't get everything. Davila denied fast-track access to OpenAI's R&D on metal finishes, power management and battery functionality, leaving that for ordinary discovery. He also put off every request built on Apple's term "Apple Originated Information," calling it "amorphous as currently defined." Apple has five days to work out a tighter definition with the defendants.
OpenAI says the suit is baseless and a pretext for Apple losing engineers, according to Bloomberg Law. A discovery order isn't a ruling on the merits, but Davila clearly thinks Apple has shown enough to justify the hurry.
— via TechCrunch.