TL;DR: Preventing the code from being stolen is actually hard.
The opponent I’m imagining isn’t Facebook Research, it’s China.
The way to keep something away from China if they are interested, is basically never connecting it to the internet. The word “never” is very strong and includes training your staff who “only want to plug in to update their tensorflow package”, make sure your cleaning people are never near a company computer or ethernet port (you’ll have no wifi networks, of course), in your own building, with guards (who you can trust somehow, using some hiring process that doesn’t itself fail at all), and so on. This might perhaps keep China out for a few years.
Update: Anthropic’s own computers are connected to the internet. link. This was said publicly by the person in charge of Anthropic’s information security.
TL;DR: Preventing the code from being stolen is actually hard.
The opponent I’m imagining isn’t Facebook Research, it’s China.
The way to keep something away from China if they are interested, is basically never connecting it to the internet. The word “never” is very strong and includes training your staff who “only want to plug in to update their tensorflow package”, make sure your cleaning people are never near a company computer or ethernet port (you’ll have no wifi networks, of course), in your own building, with guards (who you can trust somehow, using some hiring process that doesn’t itself fail at all), and so on. This might perhaps keep China out for a few years.
We might need Mad Eye Moody on our team.
Happy to talk about this!
Update: Anthropic’s own computers are connected to the internet. link. This was said publicly by the person in charge of Anthropic’s information security.