Toronto-based Private AI, a developer of data privacy software offerings, launched its latest product – PrivateGPT – to help organizations safely leverage OpenAI’s chatbot without compromising customer or employee privacy. PrivateGPT is an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tool that redacts Personally Identifiable Information (PII) prompts before sending it to ChatGPT, and then re-populates the PII within the answer for a secure user experience. Entities can be toggled on or off to provide ChatGPT with the context it needs, or privacy mode can be turned off entirely.
This launch is a timely one as more and more organizations are getting into the mix of utilizing language models and Artificial Intelligence. Data protection laws such as Canada’s Privacy Protection Act (CPPA), Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and others require companies to get consent for all uses of their users’ personal data, and also comply with requests to be forgotten. Through the use of PrivateGPT, companies are able to maintain control over their data, preserving data privacy.
The purpose of Private AI’s product is to help companies remember and maintain data privacy. This was put to the test on March 20 when a major privacy breach occurred at OpenAI and the company was forced to take ChatGPT offline due to a “bug” in the open source library. It is possible for some users to have seen another active user’s first and last name, email address, payment address, credit card type and the last four digits (only) of a credit card number, and credit card expiration date but, happily, not full credit card numbers.
Patricia Thaine, co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of the company launched in 2019 by privacy and machine learning experts from the University of Toronto, believes that compliance with the GDPR and other regulations means that companies must get positive consent from individuals whose personal data is being used, for the specific purposes of use, and also requires all locations of said data to be kept track of. Companies should only use the data they need to use, and PrivateGPT offers a layer of protection to ensure the safety of user data.
The company, which is backed by M12, Microsoft’s venture fund, and BDC, revealed that it had started development of PrivateGPT in mid-March. They believe this product can become a gold standard reference architecture for how to safely leverage third-party AI services for internal corporate use, and plans to extend the product to cover more than just ChatGPT and other OpenAI services, but also additional organizations’ products like Cohere, Anthropic, and open source LLMs like Dolly from Databricks.
Currently, a free demo of PrivateGPT is available through the company’s website but pricing for the service has yet to be determined. The team at Private AI is actively working with a number of large corporations in North America and Europe on commercial deals.
