Samsung engineers shared top secret data and source code with ChatGPT

Posted on Saturday, Apr 15, 2023 by Chris Hayner

Featured in this episode of Chaos Lever

Let’s call this one the Oops of the Week. Here’s a new story that I’m guessing we’re going to hear a lot about in the coming years: Samsung had a policy allowing their users access to ChatGPT for the purposes of, among other things, accelerating code development.

Employees, in their haste/unremitting pressure from above, used it for all that it was worth. And that included: internal source code, meeting notes relating to hardware and future plans, and test sequences used in identifying faults in chips. Now that information is housed in OpenAIs servers for other to discover. That’s… not great.

Samsung has no real recourse here because ChatGPT’s Terms of Service clearly state that any and all data inputted into the system is now the property of OpenAI and will be used to train the models. Now on the one hand that will probably take a while, so the secrets are safe…ish?

On the other hand, ChatGPT JUST had an outage caused because people noticed bugs in the ChatGPT service itself that allowed users to read other users chat histories. So, yeah. Oops.

Samsung is apparently investing in their own, private ChatGPT now to stop these kinds of things from happening, which is probably what everyone’s gonna do sooner rather than later. In the meantime, just remember kids: treat these chat clients like Facebook. Truth is definitely subjective, and there’s no such thing as private.