I don’t think Apple is a useful model here at all.
I’m pretty sure secrecy has been key for Apple’s ability to control its brand,
Well, Apple thinks so anyway. They may or may not be right, and “control of the brand” may or may not be important anyway. But anyway it’s true that Apple can keep secrets to some degree.
and it’s not just slowed itself down,
Apple is a unitary organization, though. It has a boundary. It’s small enough that you can find the person whose job it is to care about any given issue, and you are unlikely to miss anybody who needs to know. It has well-defined procedures and effective enforcement. Its secrets have a relatively short lifetime of maybe as much as 2 or 3 years.
Anybody who is spying on Apple is likely to be either a lot smaller, or heavily constrained in how they can safely use any secret they get. If I’m at Google and I steal something from Apple, I can’t publicize it internally, and in fact I run a very large risk of getting fired or turned in to law enforcement if I tell it to the wrong person internally.
Apple has no adversary with a disproportionate internal communication advantage, at least not with respect to any secrets that come from Apple.
The color of the next iPhone is never going to be as interesting to any adversary as an X-risk-level AI secret. And if, say, MIRI actually has a secret that is X-risk-level, then anybody who steals it, and who’s in a position to actually use it, is not likely to feel the least bit constrained by fear of MIRI’s retaliation in using it to do whatever X-risky thing they may be doing.
I don’t think Apple is a useful model here at all.
Well, Apple thinks so anyway. They may or may not be right, and “control of the brand” may or may not be important anyway. But anyway it’s true that Apple can keep secrets to some degree.
Apple is a unitary organization, though. It has a boundary. It’s small enough that you can find the person whose job it is to care about any given issue, and you are unlikely to miss anybody who needs to know. It has well-defined procedures and effective enforcement. Its secrets have a relatively short lifetime of maybe as much as 2 or 3 years.
Anybody who is spying on Apple is likely to be either a lot smaller, or heavily constrained in how they can safely use any secret they get. If I’m at Google and I steal something from Apple, I can’t publicize it internally, and in fact I run a very large risk of getting fired or turned in to law enforcement if I tell it to the wrong person internally.
Apple has no adversary with a disproportionate internal communication advantage, at least not with respect to any secrets that come from Apple.
The color of the next iPhone is never going to be as interesting to any adversary as an X-risk-level AI secret. And if, say, MIRI actually has a secret that is X-risk-level, then anybody who steals it, and who’s in a position to actually use it, is not likely to feel the least bit constrained by fear of MIRI’s retaliation in using it to do whatever X-risky thing they may be doing.