A fun aside: this person obviously created a bunch of new Bitcoin accounts to hide their activity.
It makes you think that if you were able to surreptitiously add malicious side channel software into a popular npm package that you wouldn't just need to hunt for crypto wallets with balances.
You could also probably find a market for crypto wallets with small balances or zero balances. The history and date of creation would be the value to some.
This openai employee should have gone on the dark web to buy older addresses to cloak their activity.
It's sad to say that almost all crypto use cases point to fraud. I'm excited about crypto and there is some fascinating research around anonymous transactions (like zcash). But, that real utility is always overshadowed by the actions of charlatans or worse.
> The employee, she said, “used confidential OpenAI information in connection with external prediction markets (e.g. Polymarket).”
Note that “insider trading” is not illegal on prediction markets. The particular issue here is that the employee “disclosed” confidential information on a public forum by influencing the prices assigned to certain outcomes by prediction markets.
77 suspicious positions across 60 wallets, 13 brand-new accounts appearing 40 hours before the browser launch. First confirmed case of a major tech company firing over prediction market trades.
I do hope corporations in general take a harder stance on this. From a society perspective people with inside knowledge fleecing randoms is not a win. We've got that somewhat under control on the stock exchange, but have this absurd situation where on prediction markets it is a free for all and everyone pretends this is fine.
I also think corporations should distance themselves from individuals willing to fleece randoms. Trading in general is very wild west survival of the fittest but active exploitation of insider knowledge speak of very poor morale character
I mentioned a potential OpenAI insider in https://x.com/peterjliu/status/2024901585806225723, that was from 5 minutes of investigation. There are probably more. And then there's a lot of other companies.
This is just one way information goes from being private to being public. It is sensible that people who provide intelligence to the market be compensated, whether they're better at inferring/predicting or whether they just know something we don't.
Obviously, in a case like this, an individual would be violating the terms of their employment/non-disclosure agreement. I agree that is bad!
I don't think that damns the concept of "predicting known information".
I find it absurd that someone can create an unregulated market like Kalshi, and then all of us need to be beholden to it, even though the idea is stupid. How is it possible that someone can create a product that none of us agree on, and now everyone else has to conform to the rules around it because of the problems that it creates. I would rather Kalshi get shut down than the precedent of allowing this to control employees or people.
The real issue here isn't just the insider trading -- it's how thin Kalshi and Polymarket orderbooks are on niche events. You can move the price 10-15 cents on a binary contract with a few thousand dollars. That makes insider trading on these platforms both incredibly easy and incredibly profitable compared to traditional securities markets where you'd need serious capital to materially move the price.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 36.7 ms ] threadIt makes you think that if you were able to surreptitiously add malicious side channel software into a popular npm package that you wouldn't just need to hunt for crypto wallets with balances.
You could also probably find a market for crypto wallets with small balances or zero balances. The history and date of creation would be the value to some.
This openai employee should have gone on the dark web to buy older addresses to cloak their activity.
It's sad to say that almost all crypto use cases point to fraud. I'm excited about crypto and there is some fascinating research around anonymous transactions (like zcash). But, that real utility is always overshadowed by the actions of charlatans or worse.
https://news.kalshi.com/p/kalshi-trading-violation-enforceme...
https://x.com/polymarketmoney/status/2001056273500954784?s=4...
> The employee, she said, “used confidential OpenAI information in connection with external prediction markets (e.g. Polymarket).”
Note that “insider trading” is not illegal on prediction markets. The particular issue here is that the employee “disclosed” confidential information on a public forum by influencing the prices assigned to certain outcomes by prediction markets.
I wrote about why prediction markets have a structural insider trading problem that nobody's solved yet: https://philippdubach.com/posts/the-absolute-insider-mess-of...
I do hope corporations in general take a harder stance on this. From a society perspective people with inside knowledge fleecing randoms is not a win. We've got that somewhat under control on the stock exchange, but have this absurd situation where on prediction markets it is a free for all and everyone pretends this is fine.
I also think corporations should distance themselves from individuals willing to fleece randoms. Trading in general is very wild west survival of the fittest but active exploitation of insider knowledge speak of very poor morale character
Like, a 100k wager from a finance dude carries some information, but a 10k wager from a staffer says a lot more!
"Predicting" private, known information is the wrong use case.
Obviously, in a case like this, an individual would be violating the terms of their employment/non-disclosure agreement. I agree that is bad!
I don't think that damns the concept of "predicting known information".
(a) how did they identify the employee, and (b) how come they weren't sent to jail
I would understand a low salaried person doing this, but not someone from a really high paying org