OpenAI Privacy Filter
114 points by tanelpoder 4 days ago | 18 comments

hiAndrewQuinn 3 days ago
I'm surprised nobody else has commented on this. This is a very straightforward and useful thing for a small locally runnable model to do.
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apothegm 3 days ago
And also something that it’s dangerous to try to do stochastically.
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hiAndrewQuinn 3 days ago
It's going to be stochastic in some sense whether you want it to be or not, human error never reaches zero percent. I would bet you a penny you'd get better results doing one two-second automated pass + your usual PII redaction than your PII redaction alone.
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cyanydeez 3 days ago
I think the problem is most secrets arn't stochastic; they're determinant. When the user types in the wrong password, it should be blocked. Using a probabilistic model suggests an attacker only now needs to be really close, but not correct.

Sure, there's some math that says being really close and exact arn't a big deal; but then you're also saying your secrets don't need to be exact when decoding them and they absolutely do atm.

Sure looks like a weird privacy veil that sorta might work for some things, like frosted glass, but think of a toilet stall with all frosted glass, are you still comfortable going to the bathroom in there?

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CityOfThrowaway 9 minutes ago
I dunno what use case you're thinking this is for.

The use case for this is that many enterprise customers want SaaS products to strip PII from ingested content, and there's no non-model way to do it.

Think, ingesting call transcripts where those calls may include credit card numbers or private data. The call transcripts are very useful for various things, but for obvious reasons we don't want to ingest the PII.

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moralestapia 3 days ago
The alternative being?
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ashwindharne 3 days ago
Same here, this is an incredibly useful thing to have in the toolkit
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stratos123 3 days ago
There's some interesting technical details in this release:

> Privacy Filter is a bidirectional token-classification model with span decoding. It begins from an autoregressive pretrained checkpoint and is then adapted into a token classifier over a fixed taxonomy of privacy labels. Instead of generating text token by token, it labels an input sequence in one pass and then decodes coherent spans with a constrained Viterbi procedure.

> The released model has 1.5B total parameters with 50M active parameters.

> [To build it] we converted a pretrained language model into a bidirectional token classifier by replacing the language modeling head with a token-classification head and post-training it with a supervised classification objective.

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LatencyKills 51 minutes ago
Couldn't this be used to locate private data in unstructured text without having to rely on other means of PII detection?

1. Pass the raw text through the filter to obtain the spans.

2. Map all the spans back to the original text.

Now you have all the PII information.

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Everdred2dx 8 minutes ago
Yep, and already has been done.

https://github.com/chiefautism/privacy-parser

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aubinkure 3 days ago
Exciting! I took a look through the code and found what appear to be the entity types for future releases - this release (V2 config) supports 8 entity types, but the V4 and V7 taxonomies have >20, mostly more personal ID types. Given this is a preview release, I imagine they'll release these.

Details in my review article here: https://piieraser.ai/blog/openai-privacy-filter. Disclaimer: I also build PII detection systems.

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mplanchard 3 days ago
It would be nice if their examples weren’t mostly things that are easy to catch with regex, but it’s cool to see if released as an open, local model.
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JLO64 53 minutes ago
For my customers I use regexes to block them from potentially publishing personal emails/phone numbers to their websites but I really wouldn't mind running this in addition just for the extra peace of mind. I don't have a GPU on our server, but I hope this is light enough of a model to handle CPU only inference on less than 2k tokens at a time.
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7777777phil 3 days ago
> The model is available today under the Apache 2.0 license on Hugging Face (opens in a new window) and Github (opens in a new window).

Bringing back the Open to OpenAI..

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Havoc 3 days ago
50M effective parameters is impressively light. Is there a similarly light model on the prompt injection side? Most of the mainstream ones seem heavier
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mentalgear 2 days ago
SuperagentLM made available on-edge PPI redaction models already a few years ago in sizes 20B, 3B, 200M. They still seem to be available via their legacy API - well worth checking out to compare against this one. https://docs.superagent.sh/legacy/llms/superagent-lm-redact-...
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ndom91 3 days ago
Where's the gguf from Unsloth and co?
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nickthegreek 46 minutes ago
[dead]
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y0eswddl 3 days ago
[flagged]
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klauserc 3 days ago
Was my first thought as well, but this is an open weights model. You can run it on your own hardware.
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