Vitalik Uses Local Models for Privacy

Doing a bit of a self-experiment. Goal: use my personal health and travel data to provide personalized diet and exercise recommendations for me, using frontier models but in a way that avoids leaking to them any private information. Strategy: use a local model (Qwen 3.8 Flash Next) to orchestrate, and use powerful remote models as a tool call to benefit from higher-level thinking and knowledge that the local model does not have. Three-layer approach to privacy: Avoid leaking personally identifiable information, or leaking my identity through writing style -> local model writes the queries to the frontier model, not me Avoid leaking who I am through the payment channel -> zkAPI Avoid leaking who I am through networking / IP -> Tor You need all three (and finally we have all three, at least to some extent) A skill file teaches the local model when and how to construct minimally-data-revealing requests to remote models. Use zkAPI-wrapped-with-Tor as a CLI tool. And everything works! I got the recommendations back, info from frontier models helped to improve them. Main deficiencies: * Tor is really not optimized for request-by-request de-linking, which is the only form of network-layer privacy that really makes sense in today's world (long-running identifiers are too fragile). Probably not private enough, and latency 10-100x higher than it could be, at the same time. * The skill file's request construction strategies are definitely far from optimal. * Qwen 3.8 Flash Next is still too slow for comfort. It's comfortably running at 20-30 TPS, but it would only really start to feel fast at 100+ * There is a tradeoff: the more careful you are about what data you give to a remote model, the less it can help you https://t.co/1g81Mp1sWW