Homomorphic AI Is Real

Homomorphic encryption is a wild concept. You can actually compute on encrypted data without ever decrypting it. The data stays encrypted the entire time.

Healthcare needs this desperately. Patient data is incredibly sensitive but AI could save lives if we could use it. Right now you either share your data with model providers which is a privacy nightmare or hospitals deploy models locally which is an operational nightmare.

With homomorphic encryption, the data never gets decrypted. Not during processing, not during inference, never. The model operates entirely on ciphertext and returns encrypted results that only you can decrypt.

The performance overhead is crushing though. Operations that normally take milliseconds now take seconds. We're talking 1000x slower. But for sensitive data, that might be worth it.

Batching helps make it economical. Process thousands of encrypted inferences in parallel to spread the overhead. Still slow but viable for high value computations.

Hardware acceleration is coming and algorithms keep improving. Today's 1000x overhead might be tomorrow's 10x. This is the foundation for truly private AI.