Byron Wan

🇨🇳 Linwei Ding (丁林葳) lived in Silicon Valley but he spent months at a time in his native China. Nothing unusual about that — except that he was supposed to be working full time as a software engineer in Google’s San Francisco-area offices. Ding had others badge him into Google buildings, making it appear as if he were coming to work, when he’s actually busy marketing himself to Chinese companies as an expert in AI. Ding stole 500 files containing some of Google’s most important AI secrets. It’s unknown whether Ding had distributed the stolen material to his partners in China — in other words, it’s not clear the information was protected. The stolen technology was extremely significant, representing 10 to 15 years of work by Google scientists. The technology Ding stole involves the building blocks of Google’s advanced supercomputing data centers that fuel the remarkably humanlike answers consumers see when they ask questions of ChatGPT. The stolen secrets related to both software and hardware, including information about advanced computer chips that the US government has worked hard to keep out of Chinese hands. “That’s one of the most concerning aspects — that this sort of undercuts the US efforts to [prevent] China being able to develop this technology. This will give them new capabilities and insights that were developed by Google over the last 10 years at least, to develop these very advanced chips for training AI models.” If a Chinese national were to take protected information of their own accord, patent it in China and open their own business with it, “good luck challenging that in court in China. It rarely if ever succeeds.”