Disclosure: I work on Origin [1]. We built a platform for enterprises that consumes OTEL, and other traces without a proxy or an LLM gateway. We even support collecting traces from local inference workloads.
For supported tools, we collect prompts, responses, and tool calls, then tie them to the user, organizational context and what actually happened on the machine. We can then use this data to detect when agents (or the people piloting them) do bad things [2].
Bell didn’t steal the invention. There were many people working on it at the same time, but he and Watson were the first to actually a) patent it, and b) demonstrate it functionally.
While I wouldn't go as far as claiming Bell stole the patent, that he filed his patent within hours of Elisha Grey is so fortuitous a coinicidence that one can't help but wonder if it weren't a coincidence.
Pedantic aside: the word "fortuitous" means "happened completely by chance", which is the opposite of what you seem to be implying here. You probably want a word like "incredible" or "unlikely" instead.
> Many object to the use of fortuitous to mean simply “fortunate” and insist that it should be limited to its original sense of “accidental.” In modern standard use, however, fortuitous almost always carries the senses both of accident or chance and luck or fortune. It is infrequently used in its sense of “accidental” without the suggestion of good luck, and even less frequently in the sense “lucky” without at least a suggestion of accident or chance
"People object" because it's confusing to use the word 'fortuitous' (which means accidental) if 'fortunate' (which means lucky) is intended, unless the situation happens to also be accidental and the goal is to highlight the chance aspect. I wouldn't "insist" about this, unless working as a copyeditor, but many uses of the word "fortuitous" make it clear that the speaker/writer doesn't really know what the word means, and it often ends up sounding pretentious when people use "fancy" uncommon words incorrectly.
In any case, neither of these words is the right choice in the context of the previous comment. A word like "incredible" or "unlikely" or "amazing" would more clearly express the idea.
> Commissioner Anabell Brumford: Ladies and gentlemen, I would now like to introduce a most special American. Tonight, he is being honoured for his 1000th drug-dealer killed.
> Lt. Frank Drebin: [to applause] Thank you. But, in all honesty, the last three I backed over with my car. Luckily, they turned out to be drug-dealers.
Here, "luckily" gives the dark implication that the police covered up Drebin's killing of three people by posthumously framing them as drug-dealers... and maybe the other 997 people as well. "Luckily" is nicely understated where "amazingly" would be too obvious, and "incredibly" doesn't work at all.
My read is that the US has over-indexed heavily on "intellectual property" and that position is profitable, but an overall net drag on innovation and research.
China is much less indexed on IP, and often outright ignores it. This allows them to be much more competitive in innovation over the long term, but at short term reputational damage.
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From the US side - if you're a company operating in a restrictive, patent encumbered space... it absolutely feels like an unfair field. Those other companies are able to ignore the restrictions you're hemmed in by (steal).
From the China side - if you're a company operating outside of compliance with licensing and IP, you get a reputation for "just stealing" even when your research is novel and impactful.
Of the two - I believe the US is "more incorrect". The current IP laws feel a lot less like encouraging innovation and a lot more like government enabled and funded rent-seeking.
For example, let's not pretend the frontier AI labs aren't violating copyrights on a massive scale.
There have been other subtle examples of US companies being cavalier as to IP over the years, but courts (and the US government) have pretty much allowed companies to do so without so much as a wrist slap.
It's still doing exactly that. Bullying Taiwanese and European companies to move their production facilities, throwing their CEO's in prison and then offering freedom in exchange for a sale. I'm not going to sugarcoat how the EU is starving its graduates from access to capital to build things, but much of what comes from the US is research from other countries.
It's funny how the US is amazing because it takes the worlds research, but China is horrible because it steals IP from companies it invests in.
Whatever, even if you ignore the company IP side of things, 8 out of 10 top 5G research Universities are Chinese now.
Not long ago I remember reading that Britain was complaining about how Germany was creating counterfeit items with british labels and that Made in Germany back then was something imposed on them to deal with this situation. It was some sort of Trade conference in Europe in the 19th century I believe, but I cannot find that book anymore.
I think LLMs are going to be (are) excellent at skirting IP law - 'make me something that does the exact same thing, but is sufficiently different that it can be considered novel'
I think IP is the type of thing where countries that benefit from enforcing it will do so while those who get more benefit from ignoring it will ignore it. China has reached a point where they greatly benefit from IP now and may really start enforcing it. That said, I wouldn't bet on it. China has a tendency to act in ways that defy Western understanding of the world. (BTW, I love it when they do because it's one of those moments that make you go "huh?" and prompts you to investigate more. I usually end up learning something in the process. It's fun if you're into that kind of thing.)
I want to give grace to people who have outdated perspectives on China. China's journey in development is extraordinarily compressed. It's gone through more stages within a single generation than countries do in a century. People's perception will take time to catch up. Unless you're an avid China watcher, the changes in China can really surprise people.
It doesn't even make sense. Huawei has R&D centers all over the world. Their largest outside of China is actually in India. But they also have research centers in Japan, Russia, Brazil, Sweden, Germany, Turkey, the UK, and many more. They help drive research all across the globe. They and the countries they invest in mutually benefit from this partnership
how does them partnering with some Canadian R&D facilities contradict anything in GP's post? They also have a ton of R&D in Sweden, Russia, Brazil, Japan, etc. Their largest R&D center outside of China is actually India
Google "Huawei Nortel Networks". The fact is that Nortel has an enormous volume of R&D stolen from them and the allegation is that Chinese telecom providers were the main beneficiaries.
Edited: To reply to a child post, this is about the allegations referred to in the parent, not a statement of what I think is true now
My mom worked at Nortel in the 1990s at their Ottawa R&D campus. As a teenager visiting, I asked about corporate espionage, hoping for a story about Cisco or something. Every one of her co-workers just belted out "China" at the same time. It was apparently an open secret that the Chinese were hoovering up IP and management didn't care. It's a bit of a shame as Nortel's telecom kit was considered top-notch (especially the cellular stuff), but it gave the Chinese an enormous amount of help catching up.
That being said, the Chinese then went off and innovated off of it and Nortel imploded, mostly due to other poor management reasons. My mom was at least smart enough to cash out most of her equity as she got them, though. Lotta people lost everything.
The patents they built today are founded on the patents they derived stealing from nortel. Qualcomm needs these whitewashed patents as part of this frand deal.
Nortel's patents were among the first that were critical to modern MIMO OFDM (they really were on to the future in that sense, it's not hyperbole), but most never went to Qualcomm or Huawei. When Nortel went belly-up a consortium called Rockstar co-owned by Microsoft, RIM and a few others ended up buying them for a hefty price (more than $4 billion). It's possible some of them have made their way over to Qualcomm or Huawei as part of sales over the years I guess.
Huawei's patents aren't nortel's patents. The patents huawei generated through their own work are based of off and substantially informed by the stolen work nortel did that nortel patented. It doesn't have anything to do with nortel's actual patents. It has to do with the prior art that was stolen by the prc and given to huawei.
Charitable interpretation is Huawei actually had R&D + academic linkages in Canada (was expanding aggressively globally), but Canada still drop in bucket, Canada R&D headcount peaked ~1k vs ~100k in PRC. Post sanction, Canada basically siloed from doing crown jewel work anyway.
Terminally stupid cannucks still butt and misattributing Nortel primary fell to HW stole muh secrets, not that Nortel grossly mismanaged (and outright fraud). Hint PRC stole lots of shit back then... but Nortel fucking exploded spectacularly. Why didn't CISCO explode because HW copied some homework... because unlike CISCO, Nortel was mismanaged to shit. NVM HW wasn't even state champion at the time, that was ZTE, they didn't juicy state level industrial espionage perks. Meanwhile allegations against HW vs Nortel was over optical routing, i.e. niche shit to HW overall portfolio. It's just Canadian cope.
This not mentioning Nortel basically brought this on themselves by bamboo ceiling the shit out of Chinese employees in PRC (both international/PRC nationals). Nortel HQ/Ottawa -> North PRC/Guangzhou, i.e. from Canadians to Chinese Canadians basically all defected Nortel (and poached entire R&D teams), because North PRC wasn't giving them their dues... and not just to PRC SOEs, but western competitors like lucent/acatel etc. Defectors were bitching / organizing in my local Counter Strike server, their AFKs very disruptive, so in a sense I was just as much victim as Nortel.
This is why we are building Origin (originhq.com). Having a record of every prompt, tool call and model response enterprise wide allows you to answer these kinds of questions.
I don’t think you understand that the EU and Canada both have deep vested interests in protecting Ukrainian sovereignty. Canada shares a large Arctic border with Russia, and is geopolitically motivated to prevent Russian expansionism. The EU is motivated to defend its eastern flank, and impose cost on a Russia that may just eye the Baltic states next.
What in the world is this train of thought? Do you not understand that the American President has directly threatened Canadian sovereignty multiple times over the last 2 years, even if under the auspices of “trolling” or “jokes”? In addition to that, the President is seeking direct control over Canadian trade relationships, control over its natural resources and all while attempting to destroy its industrial output.
This ignorance makes it very clear that the American voting populace does not take positive relations with erstwhile allies seriously. Increased trade integration may not be the ideal situation for Canada, but nothing about the situation is ideal. At least we won’t be subjugating ourselves to hostile hegemons like China and the USA.
For supported tools, we collect prompts, responses, and tool calls, then tie them to the user, organizational context and what actually happened on the machine. We can then use this data to detect when agents (or the people piloting them) do bad things [2].
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[1] https://www.originhq.com/
[2] https://www.originhq.com/investigations
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