Can AI Coexist With Privacy? Proton’s Andy Yen Says It Will Have To

And through using this secure execution environment, you can have a cryptographic guarantee that nobody else along the pipeline could look at what was sent to the GPU.

That’s maybe the best simplified way to explain it. And yeah, it’s possible to do some of this already today, but there are certain, let’s say, performance issues. It’s still a little bit clunky. It doesn’t have proper support across the entire stack. So I wouldn’t say it’s impossible, but it’s gonna get easier to do in the years to come.

Got it. Well, it is interesting, though, that people are already doing this today. Other products do use these trusted execution environments; they don’t just promise not to look at your conversations. But you don’t feel like it’s up to snuff yet? It doesn’t have certain features? What’s lacking? Why is Proton not using this now?

Well, first, you have to re-architect essentially your entire platform in a way to do that. So it’s quite a bit of work. Also, when we put out Lumo last year, a year ago, the technology for AI was a lot more immature, right? Then there’s also the interfaces with the GPUs themselves.

So, you know, Proton is not running on a cloud. We run our own infrastructure. And so then you’re pipelining it, and the libraries that Nvidia provides to do that have to be good, have to be stable, they have to be completely working, they have to be fleshed out, they have to be, you know, making sure there’s no security issues.

So the technology for me, like I said, it’s, it’s almost mature, but we’re probably in a better position to fully deploy it in, let’s say, the next year or two.

OK.

So it’s pretty close. Some people are already doing it, but we have a bigger deployment environment.

We have tens of millions of people using Lumo. We cannot move fast and break things as Mark Zuckerberg would say. We have to do things in a more careful and considered way because we have all the security requirements that we also have to keep in mind as well.

Yeah. I mean, to be fair, I think people do trust Proton, and that’s why people switch to Proton.

But the people who use Proton also have trust issues. They don’t want to trust anybody! I mean, for anybody who uses cryptography—you don’t want to believe a promise, you want to believe the math. So I don’t know if you’re committing to it here that you will switch …

Yeah, we are committing to it. And actually, if you look at Lumo’s security model, which is published, you’ll see that we’ve already built the infrastructure to kinda do this. We’re just missing the last piece, at the interface to the GPUs. Look, I don’t wanna give too much away, but some might infer from this that perhaps some work has already been done on this in Lumo already.

OK, very interesting.