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Can generative AI models like ChatGPT be "reverse engineered" in order to develop competing models? If so, will this activity be deemed legal reverse engineering or illegal trade secret misappropriation?

I have now written a few articles exploring this question, including Trade Secrecy Meets Generative AI and Keeping ChatGPT a Trade Secret While Selling It Too. But when I first asked this question a year and a half ago, I was getting responses purely in the negative. I asked a panel at a trade secret conference at Georgetown in 2023, "Can ChatGPT be reverse engineered?" Several members of the panel laughed.  I would talk to AI experts, and the answer I got was along the lines of: "it's not going to happen." 

This post is cross-posted on Patently-O.

 Dave Fagundes and Aaron Perzanowski have just posted a very interesting and thought-provoking paper draft on SSRN called "How Intellectual Property Ends."  

The paper, which follows up on their prior work on copyright abandonment, closely examines how IP rights come to an end through doctrines like "expiration," "forfeiture," or "abandonment." The paper seeks to provide a “taxonomy” for thinking about how IP rights end. The authors argue that imprecise or inconsistent uses of terms like "abandonment" and "forfeiture” deprives these terms of meaning and “obscures the underlying logic” of the doctrines as originally developed at common law (5). They instead posit a single unified framework for consistently conceiving of termination that can work across the four IP regimes. 

One of the key purposes of trade secret law is to address the "Arrow information paradox." The information paradox posits that there is a fundamental challenge in information exchange: It is difficult to assess the value of information without first sharing it, but once the information is shared, it becomes vulnerable to being copied, leaving the originator without compensation and without a competitive advantage.