Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, shared in a recent post on the X platform about his personal experiment where he used his health and travel data to create personalized diet and exercise recommendations. The main goal of the experiment was to provide such recommendations while avoiding personal information leaks. To implement the experiment, Buterin used the local model Qwen 3.8 Flash Next in combination with powerful remote models. The experiment was based on a three-tier approach to ensuring privacy. The first level involves preventing personal information leaks, as well as leaks through the writing style used by the local model to form requests to the remote model. The second level uses zkAPI to protect identity through a payment channel, and the third – the Tor protocol to ensure privacy at the network and IP level. Buterin noted: “You need all three levels.”
The training skills allowed the local model to effectively form requests with minimal data disclosure. He used zkAPI in combination with Tor as a command tool. According to Buterin, the experiment was successful: “Everything worked! I received recommendations, and the information from the remote models helped improve them.” Buterin also noted three main drawbacks of the experiment, emphasizing the dependency that the more cautious a user is with the data they provide to the remote model, the less it can help them.
Despite the focus on artificial intelligence, Buterin maintains the vision of Ethereum as a “cryptographic world computer.” In one of his posts, Buterin noted that Ethereum technology has significantly evolved over the past fifteen years and is ready for further development over the next three years. In his opinion, the upcoming Pectra hard fork may be the last “normal” Ethereum hard fork, as after it, the system will transition to the use of recursive STARKs, automated formal verification, highly optimized consensus algorithms, and technologies providing protection against quantum threats. Buterin stated that with PeerDAS, Ethereum is beginning to transform from just a blockchain into something much more powerful. In his view, after Pectra, the transformation will become the main story of Ethereum, which will provide significantly cheaper, scalable, and private computing with a high level of security. “The result will be much cheaper, more scalable, and more private than anything that could be done with the technologies of the previous era,” – concluded Buterin.
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