Google is making private AI practical with homomorphic encryption(blog.google)
33 pointsby u1hcw9nxan hour ago6 comments
  • sabretooth14054 minutes ago
    My master's thesis is on a topic in this field (Privacy Preserving ML) and from my understanding HE and other techniques have very high overheads(~10^3) on inference tasks and thus aren't very commercially viable.
  • filup6 minutes ago
    Proper encryption means the ciphertext is indistinguishable from noise. So...in order to be able to process on it, you have to make it not indistinguishable from noise.

    So I take offense to the term FHE. It's a oxymoron.

    The whole thing immidiatly stands out as a sham to build trust where it's gone.

    • drdecaa minute ago
      [delayed]
    • pluto_modadic2 minutes ago
      they could have gone with an oblivious transfer approach (where it's working on what looks like multiple problems at once, you don't know which)
  • Deukhoofd15 minutes ago
    It sounds neat, but I do wonder how viable this is commercially. How high do we rate the chances that governments around the world will step in before another kind of E2E is rolled out.
    • noman-land7 minutes ago
      "They" are "we". Private communication and private computation are the only way for the corporate cloud to actually help people without subjecting them to abuse.
  • LoganDark17 minutes ago
    One flaw with FHE is that it guarantees only that you need the key to see the inputs or outputs of the computation, but not necessarily that the computation is the one you want. For example, the computation could be adversarial for certain inputs, or an adversary could insert their own computation first (or last).
    • noman-landa minute ago
      100% not an expert but my understanding was that part of what you are proving by signing the computation is that the computation itself was performed specifically as agreed to. I may be mixing this up with zero knowledge proofs.
  • noident31 minutes ago
    Does this rely on the Trust Me Bro model, or is there some way for the client to verify that the provider actually isn't able to see your inputs?

    I want to read a whitepaper but all I can find is the tl;dw conference presentation

    • eslaught24 minutes ago
      The linked project page [1] claims to be fully homomorphic. Assuming the claim holds (I haven't verified it), then there is provably no way for Google or anyone else to obtain any information from the encrypted data or computation performed on them.

      FHE is traditionally horrifically slow, so it's hard to imagine running anything beyond toy models with it. They list some applications on the original article page, but (presumably) they must be dramatically stripped down in order to run within any reasonable time budget. This is not going to run anything like a Sol/Opus any time soon.

      [1]: https://heir.dev/

  • FloatArtifactan hour ago
    Encryption or not, if it's on somebody else's server, it isn't yours. I don't believe Google has my best interest.
    • kccqzya minute ago
      [delayed]
    • u1hcw9nxan hour ago
      With Fully Homomorphic Encryption it's nobody elses.

      The basic idea of of the project is to remove the need for trust.

      • unsungNovelty36 minutes ago
        It's google. They are good at engineering. Not at creating trust. After the bizillionth time they have broken trust, there is no need for benefit of the doubt.
        • Plont7 minutes ago
          Yeah. Google is an ad business. Their entire motive for getting invested in AI is ad revenue. We're supposed to believe they just... won't turn on the money fountain? After going into the red for their data center investments? Hell nah.

          I'd expect this to be something like the Google Ad ID: technically separated from what Google considers personal information, but trivially easy to tie back to an individual person and to other information about that person.

          They're continually breaking trust by illegally scraping up the internet to feed to their plagiarism machine, which they are now asking us to trust with more data. It's not a compelling arguement.

        • throwaway274488 minutes ago
          There's more to life than branding.
        • tonyhart76 minutes ago
          so what's the option ??? Meta ?? xAi ?? or OpenAI ???
      • thih927 minutes ago
        To what end?
    • krunck33 minutes ago
      It's FHE for "cryptographically-secure private AI inference" not for every other service where they snoop into your behavioral information.