actuaries look for data. visionaries take leaps in faith. There was no data proving LLMs will work at scale. Google waited for the Data. OpenAI and then Anthropic took the leap of faith. The result is there for all to see. The core attribute of a successful AI Researcher was were they AGI-pilled and not were they waiting for data for unknown unknowns?

I don't have any data either but I agree with him, based on my experience working for lots of different companies and seeing their attitude to IP, with varying levels of paranoia.

Companies can be really paranoid about IP theft. The worst company I've worked at was Dyson, who are super paranoid. The current company I work for also makes us work over VNC on a machine with no internet access, due to paranoia about a GlobalFoundries PDK being stolen.

In the vast majority of cases, stealing IP would be not useful at all. For example I worked on a RISC-V CPU. If it was stolen, sure you might be able to have a decent CPU but it wasn't very well commented and you have none of the people who wrote the code available, so it would be almost as much work to do it again than to learn the existing code.

Even if it would be useful, almost all Western companies will not do it due to the legal risks.

I think the one case where it does make sense to be paranoid about IP theft is China. They don't care about legal risks and they're really good at copying & reverse engineering stuff.