
Episode 329
Creating a private AI assistant in Thunderbird
Practical AI · Practical AI LLC
September 23, 202553m 8s
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Show Notes
In this episode, Daniel and Chris are joined by Chris Aquino, software engineer at Thunderbird to hear the story of how they developed a privacy-preserving AI executive assistant. They discuss various design decisions including remote (but confidential) inference, local encryption, and model selection. Chris A. does an amazing job describing the journey from "let the big LLM do everything" to splitting apart the workflow to be handled by multiple models.
Featuring:
- Chris Aquino – LinkedIn
- Chris Benson – Website, LinkedIn, Bluesky, GitHub, X
- Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X
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Topics
changelogaimachine learningdeep learningartificial intelligenceneural networkscomputer vision