HN

Need help?
<- Back
OpenAI fires an employee for prediction market insider trading

OpenAI fires an employee for prediction market insider trading

bookofjoe

Comments (126)

  • 7777777phil
    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 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...
  • cjonas
    Insider trading is so trivial on the prediction markets. I'd guess that it's actually the "feature" that results in the outcomes being so accurate.
  • peterjliu
    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.
  • helsinkiandrew
    Interestingly Kalshi has ‘banned’ insider trading, whilst polymarkets often tweets that some of their users must have inside informationhttps://news.kalshi.com/p/kalshi-trading-violation-enforceme...https://x.com/polymarketmoney/status/2001056273500954784?s=4...
  • xrd
    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.
  • ddp26
    Prediction markets are interesting when they are predicting future things nobody knows for sure."Predicting" private, known information is the wrong use case.
  • MarceliusK
    Makes you wonder how much "market accuracy" on these platforms is actually just leakage
  • mrkramer
    Inside trading on the public market and on the public blockchain, that's smart!
  • seydor
    I can't believe these markets are still legal
  • rapind
    Bad leaders get bad followers.
  • bookofjoe
  • shevy-java
    We can not trust these AI corporations and organisations.
  • Havoc
    Good.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
  • blindriver
    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.
  • senkora
    EDIT: I am wrong, see children> 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.
  • chazftw
    That’s pretty common, you may think you own the data you work on, but you don’t. It’s proprietary confidential.
  • MengerSponge
    Wouldn't those prediction markets be more efficient if positions were associated with people's real names?Like, a 100k wager from a finance dude carries some information, but a 10k wager from a staffer says a lot more!
  • djohnston
    that's right prole! only Congress has that privilege!
  • croes
    Prediction market, either gambling or inside trading.