OpenAI model for masking personally identifiable information (PII) in text
38 points
13 hours ago
| 7 comments
| openai.com
| HN
stratos123
3 hours ago
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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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hiAndrewQuinn
10 hours ago
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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
9 hours ago
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And also something that it’s dangerous to try to do stochastically.
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hiAndrewQuinn
9 hours ago
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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 hours ago
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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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ashwindharne
10 hours ago
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Same here, this is an incredibly useful thing to have in the toolkit
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mplanchard
2 hours ago
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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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Havoc
3 hours ago
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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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ndom91
2 hours ago
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Where's the gguf from Unsloth and co?
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y0eswddl
9 hours ago
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crying_laughing_emoji.gif

yes, please, feed daddy AI all your PII

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klauserc
9 hours ago
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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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7777777phil
7 hours ago
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> 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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