Earlier LLMs used to be a goldmine for company secrets (when it learned documents that shouldn't be on public internet). Most of it seem to be scrubbed now.
Sounds fake. LLMs don't usually memorize things that appear once in their training set anyway, nor have I heard about major issues accidentally training on a bunch of non-public data.
I can see how someone would believe it to be true though, since LLMs can easily hallucinate in a way that looks like this is true.
My mother-in-law is like this with knowing what various relatives are doing. Being the gatekeeper of knowledge gives her imagined power. I guess it's just part of the human condition.
I know sysadmins and programmers who behave exactly they same way. They could give you permission or a script to do the thing you need to do but they'd rather have you come to them and ask them to do it. Gives them a sense of purpose, I guess.
If someone shows me they are good at something they are going to have to expect being sent trickier problems.
Sometimes it might seem like I keep things a secret. I am probably just having a bad day.
I could be off base here about your experience, but I know that some people made the same comments about me when I pushed back on sharing dangerous credentials with inexperienced coworkers. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Also, if people start rooting around in everything they can take things out of context. If I send a message to my boss that I think that something we're doing is stupid, if that were public it could make some waves even though internally it's inconsequential because I'm a nobody. Also, many documents might have one or two bits that hint to really important information and having them can help finding those
As you probably know, there's tons of information in a multinational and the hardest part is finding the right stuff. This is one of the main tasks I use Copilot for. Also because outlook and SharePoint search are really terrible though. If those actually worked I wouldn't need copilot so much.
Using that information for trading is illegal, but so is exposing that information outside of approved channels.
Whatever the case, the only time people look at your social media history is to look for attacks and the only reason they will look at a company's slack messages and emails are to look for attacks during discovery.
I would argue that company secrets are mostly useless for the company but very, very useful to other companies. For this reason, there should be retention policy of a day or two for almost all communication unless it is important, required by law, or documentation. And, definitely do not share that information with the public without good reason.
Of course it depends what secrets. 99% will just be internal process drivel and inter departmental bickering but there's some real important stuff in there too.
Startups are probably most vulnerable as they are likely to use more "pet" techniques for infra, like SSH open to any IP to make changes.
Something like the top screenshot here, though:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/chatgpt-can-leak-source-data-v...
(not parent commenter but) tl;dr no
There was a boba tea company that had a free, no-sign-in required LLM that I used to generate a few bash scripts before ChatGPT free-tier started.