Panel Discussion during Build with AI Kuala Lumpur & #GCPBoleh AI Study Jam 2024

Build with AI Kuala Lumpur Panel Discussion: LLM Data Privacy & Security

Last Saturday, I had the pleasure of hosting a workshop and participating as a panelist for Build with AI Kuala Lumpur & #GCPBoleh AI Study Jam 2024.

During the panel discussion, a question about LLM data privacy and compliance sparked a lot of interest, both during the session and through follow-up questions on LinkedIn. This complex topic deserves a more in-depth exploration than a brief panel discussion allows, so here’s a detailed breakdown.

Why Data Privacy Matters in AI?

Data privacy and security are fundamental to responsible AI development. AI systems, including LLMs (Large Language Models), often rely heavily on personal data. If this data isn’t managed properly, it can lead to several issues:

Misinformation Spread: LLMs trained on uncurated data can inadvertently contribute to the spread of misinformation.

Bias Amplification: Without careful training and evaluation, LLMs can replicate or even amplify biases present in their training data.

Security Challenges: The sheer size and complexity of LLMs, both in model terms and data they process, make security a major concern.

Enterprises using LLMs must ensure their practices adhere to data privacy laws like GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) or HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act). Here are some methods to achieve this:

1. Blacklists and Whitelists: These tools filter inputs and outputs, respectively. Blacklists prevent the use of prohibited terms, while whitelists encourage the use of preferred ones.
2. Security Guardrails: A more comprehensive approach, security guardrails are a set of techniques designed to ensure ethical and responsible LLM use. They encompass practices, protocols, and technologies to prevent unintended consequences.

Implementing Security Guardrails:

Effective security guardrails involve four primary steps:

1. Input Validation: Filtering out prohibited content and personal information from user inputs.
2. Output Filtering: Similarly, removing or replacing unwanted content in LLM outputs.
3. Usage Monitoring: Tracking API requests, frequency, and types of prompts used.
4. Feedback Mechanisms: Allowing users to provide feedback on LLM outputs helps identify and address potential issues.

Here are tools for implementing security guardrails:

1. NeMo-Guardrails (https://github.com/topics/nemo-guardrails)
2. Guardrails.ai (https://www.guardrailsai.com/)
3. TruLens (https://www.trulens.org/)
4. LLM Guard (https://ai.meta.com/static-resource/responsible-use-guide/) (Not mentioned in the panel discussion)
5. Llama Guard (https://ai.meta.com/.../llama-guard-llm-based-input.../) (For users working with Llama models)

Incident Response Plan

Having a robust incident response plan is crucial and also part of the criteria to ensure compliance. This plan outlines steps to take in case of security breaches:

1. Preparation: Identifying digital assets, potential threats, and assembling a dedicated response team.
2. Detection and Analysis: Vigilant monitoring to identify and assess security incidents.
3. Containment, Eradication, and Recovery: Minimizing damage, removing threats, and restoring systems.
4. Post-Incident Phase: Effective communication with all stakeholders involved.

Environmental Considerations

While LLM technology advances, minimizing its environmental impact is also essential to comply with environmental law (so far I only had one project that had to comply to this). Some eco-friendly approaches used are:

1. Knowledge Distillation: Creating smaller, more efficient models that retain core capabilities with lower energy requirements. We use MiniLLM for this.
2. Transfer Learning: Leveraging knowledge from pre-trained models reduces the need for extensive retraining.
3. Model Pruning and Compression: Removing computational redundancies within models further reduces energy consumption. There are a few types of quantization methods I have used, including GGUF (GPT-Generated Unified Format), AWQ (Activation-aware Weight Quantization) and GPTQ (Accurate Post-training Compression for Generative Pretrained Transformers).