One of the things that we did not expect on our 2023 bingo card was Nvidia being sued for stealing trade secrets. The company has been going great guns with their innovations in the world of AI, and their GPUs are obviously the best in the market at the moment, which begs the question – What was so enticing that they had to make away with competitor data?
This is what happened,
One of the Nvidia Engineers, who was working in the offices of French automaker Valeo, inadvertently revealed a source code, while on a meeting between the two companies. Valeo was quick to take a screen grab of the same and now, it looks like the matter has escalated. Just to put things into perspective, Valeo and Nvidia are currently working on an advanced parking and driving assistance technology offered by a manufacturer to its customers. Earlier, Valeo was repsonsible for the development of the hardware and the software for the various manufacturers.
But, in 2021, the bigger organisation won the contract to develop the software for the driver assistance system. In their lawsuit, Valeo has put down, what they believe happened. The engineer in question, granteed his personal email, full access to Valeo’s database and proceeded to steal “tens of thousands of files” and 6GB of source code, and then, he took the stolen data and moved to Nvidia, where he was offered a senior position.
Incidentally, the engineer was working on a similar project at Nvidia, making his stolen information, even more relevant and powerful. Since then, the engineer has pleaded guilty to stealing privileged information and has also been fined €14,400 ($15,750) in September, in a German court. Nvidia has put its hands up and said that they have no interest in this source code or any of the data that was stolen by their employee and that they will do everything in their power to protect the rights of their employees and brand. Valeo was not interested in this statement and said that the fact that the source code was in Nvidia’s possession meant that they saved millions of dollars in development costs, and as such, must pay a penalty for such unethical practices.
It remains to be seen how this case pans out, but one thing is for sure, the competition in the autonomous driving market is reaching boiling point.
