alt Hacker NewsThere'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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> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> violating trade secret law
There is law for patents. Trade secrets exist outside the realm of enforcement.
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.