Great work! I'm interested to know where the GPU servers are located. Are they in the US; do you run your own datacenter or rent servers on the hyperscalers?
Launch HN: Tinfoil (YC X25): Verifiable Privacy for Cloud AI
81–90 of 106 posts
Re: Launch HN: Tinfoil (YC X25): Verifiable Privacy for Cloud AI
#82How large do you wager your moat to be? Confidential computing is something all major cloud providers either have or are about to have and from there it's a very small step to offer LLM-s under the same umbrella. First mover advantage is of course considerable, but I can't help but feel that this market will very quickly be swallowed by the hyperscalers.
Being gobbled by the hyperscalers may well be the plan. Reasonable bet.
GCP has confidential VMs with H100 GPUs; I'm not sure if Google would be interested. And they get huge discount buying GPUs in bulk. The trade-off between cost and privacy is obvious for most users imo.
Re: Launch HN: Tinfoil (YC X25): Verifiable Privacy for Cloud AI
#83Great work! I'm interested to know where the GPU servers are located. Are they in the US; do you run your own datacenter or rent servers on the hyperscalers?
Yes, in the US right now. We don't run our own datacenters, though we sometimes consider it in a moment of frustration when the provider is not able to get the correct hardware configuration and firmware versions. Currently renting bare metal servers from neoclouds. We can't use hyperscalers because we need bare metal access to the machine.
Re: Launch HN: Tinfoil (YC X25): Verifiable Privacy for Cloud AI
#84Just noticed Tinfoil runs Deepseek-R1 "70b". Technically this is not the original 671b Deepseek R1; it's just a Llama-70b trained by Deepseek R1 (called "distillation").
Re: Launch HN: Tinfoil (YC X25): Verifiable Privacy for Cloud AI
#85Great work! I'm interested to know where the GPU servers are located. Are they in the US; do you run your own datacenter or rent servers on the hyperscalers?
Yes, in the US right now. We don't run our own datacenters, though we sometimes consider it in a moment of frustration when the provider is not able to get the correct hardware configuration and firmware versions. Currently renting bare metal servers from neoclouds. We can't use hyperscalers because we need bare metal access to the machine.
Thanks that's great to know. btw does a user need to trust Neoclouds in case they install malicious hardware/firmware/software on the servers?
Re: Launch HN: Tinfoil (YC X25): Verifiable Privacy for Cloud AI
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, in the US right now. We don't run our own datacenters, though we sometimes consider it in a moment of frustration when the provider is not able to get the correct hardware configuration and firmware versions. Currently renting bare metal servers from neoclouds. We can't use hyperscalers because we need bare metal access to the machine.
Thanks that's great to know. btw does a user need to trust Neoclouds in case they install malicious hardware/firmware/software on the servers?
That's the best part, you don't. You only need to trust NVIDIA and AMD/Intel.
Modulo difficult to mount physical attacks and side channels, which we wrote more about here: https://tinfoil.sh/blog/2025-05-15-side-channels
Re: Launch HN: Tinfoil (YC X25): Verifiable Privacy for Cloud AI
#87Looks great. Not sure how big the market is between "need max privacy, need on-prem" and "don't care, just use what is cheap/popular" tho. Can you talk about how this relates to / is different / is differentiated from what Apple claimed to do during their last WWDC? They called it "private cloud compute". (To be clear, after 11 months, this is still "announced", with no implementation anywhere, as far as I can see.)…
Anecdotal, but I work at a company offering an SMB product with LLM features. One of the first questions asked on any demo or sales call is what the privacy model for the LLM is, how the data is used, who has access to it, and can those features be disabled.
Re: Launch HN: Tinfoil (YC X25): Verifiable Privacy for Cloud AI
#88Are you HIPAA compliant?
Not yet, we're about one week away from SOC2, will pursue HIPAA which is arguably easier next.
Also curious about the potential users of your product, do you target individual users, small businesses, or large enterprises? Pursuing SOC2 and HIPPA make me think about the large ones; but aren't they already happy using hyperscalers?
Not to mention GCP and Azure both have confidential GPU offerings. How do you compete against them, as well as some startups mentioned in other comments like Edgeless Systems and Opaque Systems?
Re: Launch HN: Tinfoil (YC X25): Verifiable Privacy for Cloud AI
#89As a user, can I host the attestation server myself?
Re: Launch HN: Tinfoil (YC X25): Verifiable Privacy for Cloud AI
#90How is running a model onprem more expensive than on the cloud? Are you including training costs?
Edit: perhaps because you don’t need the model to be available all the time? In that case yeah the cloud can be cheaper