Why can I not run my private data through a model I do not own?
Opportunity
Every query you send to a remote AI model reaches the provider in the clear, and you have no cryptographic guarantee the input was not logged, retained, or used in future training. Fully homomorphic encryption eliminates that exposure but runs LLM inference at roughly 0.2 tokens per second, four orders of magnitude below any production requirement. Trusted execution environments keep latency near-normal but substitute hardware attestation for mathematical proof, meaning you are trusting a chip vendor rather than the cryptography. Multi-party computation distributes the trust but requires bandwidth and coordination rounds that do not scale to billion-parameter models. Medical notes, legal drafts, and financial records remain excluded from the most capable frontier models because no solution simultaneously clears the privacy bar and the throughput bar.
Why it matters
The entire class of sensitive-data AI applications is locked out until compute-side privacy reaches the same standard as wire-side privacy.
How I score the opportunity
The Opportunity Score is my own read, not a measurement: how much it hurts, how often it bites, and how little exists to solve it today. Higher means I think it is more worth building.
How much pain it causes when it shows up.
How often people actually run into it.
How little good tooling exists for it today.
More problems worth solving
Why does every AI app forget me the moment I close the tab?
AIWhy is learning a new field still gated by knowing what to ask?
AIWhy can a non-expert not verify what an AI just told them?
AIWhy do we test models on benchmarks but ship them on vibes?
AIWhy do AI agents have no memory of their own mistakes?
AIWhy can't I audit what a model was actually trained on?