Professor Camilla Hrdy presented her new article on trade secrets and generative AI at the Temple University Beasley School of Law IP Colloquium on February 18, 2025. Prof. Hrdy joined Temple Law professors, Guy Rub, Paul Gugliuzza, and Salil Mehra, for a fascinating discussion with students about whether generative AI products like ChatGPT are protected under trade secret law, and the trade secret law implications of efforts to “reverse engineer” new generative AI models. For example, one of the topics the group discussed was whether the developers of “DeepSeek” may have violated OpenAI’s Terms of use, and perhaps stolen OpenAI’s trade secrets as well. Of course, we do not yet know what happened, but one hypothesis is that DeepSeek was created using OpenAI’s trade secrets, improperly acquired from ChatGPT through “knowledge distillation” or other methods like “model extraction attacks.” Prof. Hrdy’s article is available here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4879849