3 Open Source Solutions to keep your privacy safe in the Age of ChatGPT

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𝐀𝐈 𝐦𝐨𝐧𝐤𝐬.𝐢𝐨

4 min readMay 15, 2023

Locked robot at the age of AI — Locked robot in the Age of AI

There is no doubt ChatGPT is an amazing technology, but it raises privacy issues. Privacy problems with “free” applications are not new and have evolved in the social media era. We all know that there is no such thing as free, and if a company offers you its services for free, it is because you are the product. ChatGPT is no different, and OpenAI has made its platform free to train its AI on a large scale with human feedback (so-called RLHF: Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback). In other words, GPT has been trained with our brains, and since it is not a public platform like social media, individuals and companies share even more private information.

Unfortunately, the platform also had a security hole that allowed other users to access conversations.

Finally, if you are a business, especially not a U.S. business, in this case, you might be constrained to keep your data within certain limits, and therefore you will not be able to use GPT for your business.

Once again, open source initiatives are to the rescue. Several projects have been built in recent weeks, and here is an overview of the available solutions.

Hugging Face Chat

This week Hugging Face (the open source AI platform) unveiled their Transformers agent and chat solution. This project is a big step forward for privacy and open source, allowing users to use open source models. However, it may be less dedicated as an on-premise solution. Still, everything is open source and can be used directly in your infrastructure.

https://huggingface.co/spaces/huggingchat/chat-ui

PrivateGPT

PrivateGPT, a more technical solution, was also released for private use. It offers a fully integrated chat UI and a language model you can host on your infrastructure.
Focused on personal use, you can ask questions about your documents without an internet connection. It is 100% private, and no data leaves your computer or server.

https://github.com/imartinez/privateGPT

Open Assistant

A truly public and open source initiative that took several months and thousands of people to develop a completely free and open source alternative to ChatGPT.

The goal is to revolutionize language innovation by allowing individuals to interact with third-party systems, access information dynamically, and develop new applications using language. This large language chatbot can operate on a single high-end consumer GPU, and its code, models, and data are available under open-source licenses.

https://open-assistant.io/

A note of caution

Although many open source models have been developed, as of May 2023, they have yet to be as effective as GPT due to their training with fewer data and resources. Training efficiency has improved significantly in recent months, but there is still a slight gap in performance, with some rankings showing a difference of 5 to 20% in response accuracy.

Conclusion

As we can see, solutions exist to keep your data private, but they require some technical knowledge to be set up. Plus, they need to be integrated with your business processes. At Kyrolabs, we are developing a solution that simplifies the process by providing companies with AI agents that eliminate the technical hassle. We also build options that allow you to retain ownership of your data with dedicated infrastructure. The models used are also specialized to specific industries to provide even more accuracy to your use cases like customer support and marketing content for specific industries, including but not only:

Food, health, and natural products
Finance, Law, Insurance
Gaming
Education
Real estate
…

Visit our website and stay tuned.

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