← Flash PapersStealing Part of a Production Language Model
Nicholas Carlini, Daniel Paleka +12 more
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Mean Squared Error:10^-4· OpenAI Ada/Babbage Matrix ReconstructionAttack Cost:< $20 USD· OpenAI Ada/BabbageAttack Cost:< $200 USD· GPT-3.5-Turbo (Dimension Extraction)
Abstract

We introduce the first model-stealing attack that extracts precise, nontrivial information from black-box production language models like OpenAI's ChatGPT or Google's PaLM-2. Specifically, our attack recovers the embedding projection layer (up to symmetries) of a transformer model, given typical API access. For under \$20 USD, our attack extracts the entire projection matrix of OpenAI's Ada and Babbage language models. We thereby confirm, for the first time, that these black-box models have a hidden dimension of 1024 and 2048, respectively. We also recover the exact hidden dimension size of the gpt-3.5-turbo model, and estimate it would cost under $2,000 in queries to recover the entire projection matrix. We conclude with potential defenses and mitigations, and discuss the implications of possible future work that could extend our attack.