I have worked for many enterprise companies e.g. banks who are trialling AI and none of them have any use for something like this. Because the entire foundation of the IT industry is based on trusting the privacy and security policies of Azure, AWS and GCP. And in the decades since they've been around not heard of a single example of them breaking this.
The proposition here is to tell a company that they can trust Azure with their banking websites, identity services and data engineering workloads but not for their model services. It just doesn't make any sense. And instead I should trust a YC startup who statistically is going to be gone in a year and will likely have their own unique set of security and privacy issues.
Also you have the issue of smaller sized open source models e.g. DeepSeek R1 lagging far behind the bigger ones and so you're giving me some unnecessary privacy attestation at the expense of a model that will give me far better accuracy and performance.
As former CTO of world's largest bank and cloud architect at world's largest hedge fund, this is exactly opposite of my experience with both regulated finance enterprises and the CSPs vying to serve them.
The entire foundation of the IT industry is based on trusting the privacy and security policies of Azure, AWS and GCP. And in the decades since they've been around not heard of a single example of them breaking this.
On the contrary, many global banks design for the assumption the "CSP is hostile". What happened to Coinbase's customers the past few months shows why your vendor's insider threat is your threat and your customers' threat.
Granted, this annoys CSPs who wish regulators would just let banks "adopt" the CSP's controls and call it a day.
Unfortunately for CSP sales teams — certainly this could change with recent regulator policy changes — the regulator wins. Until very recently, only one CSP offered controls sufficient to assure your own data privacy beyond a CSP's pinky-swears. AWS Nitro Enclaves can provide a key component in that assurance, using deployment models such as tinfoil.
Have GCP and AWS started offering this for GPUs?
And you make this claim that the cloud provider can SSH into the VM but (a) nobody serious exposes SSH ports in Production and (b) there is no documented evidence of this ever happening.
We're simply trying to bring similar capabilities to other companies. Inference is just our first product.
>cloud provider can SSH into the VM
The point we were making was that CC was traditionally used to remove trust from cloud providers, but not the application provider. We are further removing trust from ourselves (as the application provider), and we can enable our customers (who could be other startups or neoclouds) to remove trust from themselves and prove that to their customers.
There are a multitude of components between my app and your service. You have secured one of them arguably the least important. But you can't provide any guarantees over say your API server that my requests are going through. Or your networking stack which someone e.g. a government could MITM.