Welcome back to In the Loop, TIME’s new twice-weekly newsletter about AI. If you’re reading this in your browser, why not subscribe to have the next one delivered straight to your inbox? What to Know: Signal’s founder is working on encrypted chatbots Moxie Marlinspike, the cryptographic prodigy who wrote the code that underpins Signal and WhatsApp, has a new project—and it could be one of the most important things happening in AI right now. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] The tool, named Confer, is an end-to-end encrypted AI assistant. It uses smart math to ensure that even though the compute-intensive process of running the AI still happens on a server in the cloud, the only person who can access the unscrambled details of that computation is you, the user. New paradigm — That’s a clean break from the current way of doing things. When you interact with existing chatbots—unless you have a powerful computer running an open-source AI system—your data is not held privately. That’s especially true for the most useful models, which are closely guarded by AI companies, and far too big to run on a local machine anyway. Even though it may feel as intimate as a private chat, the reality is quite different. Marlinspike writes that users appear to be engaged in a conversation with an assistant, but an “honest representation” would be more akin to a group chat with “executives and employees, their business partners / service providers, the hackers who will compromise that plaintext data, the future advertisers…
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