Show Notes
Ken Liu is a Stanford CS PhD student and founder of The Open Anonymity Project. Ken’s pioneering work explores the intersection between language models and data & user privacy.
Outline: 0:00 - Teaser 1:08 - Prelude: Introducing Ken Liu 1:41 - Monologue: The Open Anonymity Project 3:41 - Ken’s Path to Privacy Research 6:31 - The Biggest Privacy Concern for LLM Users 9:39 - Three Perspectives on Tackling AI Privacy 10:57 - “AI presents a Uniquely Worse Privacy Problem” 13:44 - The Open Anonymity (OA) Project: Unlinkable Inference 17:50 - Blind Signatures as Unlinkable Authentication 20:52 - Secure Inference Proxies 28:31 - Threat Model in the OA Project 31:39 - What If People Give Away Information In Their Prompts 35:58 - OpenClaw, Privacy Nightmare In Agents 43:00 - The Stories Behind the OA Project 50:14 - Intelligence Neutrality 52:22 - Safety Concerns in a World with Private AI Inference
References: Ken Liu’s Home Page: https://ai.stanford.edu/~kzliu/ The Open Anonymity Project: https://openanonymity.ai/ Unlinkable Inference as a User Privacy Architecture: https://openanonymity.ai/blog/unlinkable-inference/
Podcast Links: Podcast website: https://augmented-mind.github.io/ Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/augmented-mind-podcast/id186810217Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/40KculkYTe2tOpqJm6TAYr?si=PU_UncsMT4mXjVNCRwoXog&nd=1&dlsi=6d9bed7a43d6408RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/10dbf5b7c/podcast/rss
About the Hosts: The AM Podcast is hosted by Yijia Shao, Shannon Shen, and Michael Ryan, CS PhD students at Stanford University and MIT.
More from Augmented Mind Podcast
Geoffrey Litt is a design engineer at Notion. Previously, he was a senior researcher at the independent research lab Ink & Switch, and he got his PhD in HCI at MIT. Geoffrey’s work focuses on malleable software and designing environments for thinking.
Zora Wang is a CS PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University. Zora’s work lies at the intersection of coding agents and human-ai collaboration. In this episode we explore how agents work, how humans work, and how we can get more done together.
Jeremy Avigad is a professor in the Department of Philosophy and the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. Jeremy is a pioneer in using AI for Mathematics and the co-creator of the Lean Theorem Prover. Currently, he is the director of the Hoskinson Center for Formal Mathematics at CMU, Dean's Chair in Logic and Philosophy of Mathematics, and the director of the newly-established Institute for Computer-Aided Reasoning in Mathematics under NSF.
Woosuk Kwon is CTO of Inferact and creator of the vLLM inference library. Woosuk shares what it takes to build the most popular open-source LLM inference engine from a human-centered perspective.
Sherry Wu is a professor at CMU whose research sits at the intersection of human-computer interaction and natural language processing. From making AI work for imperfect humans to making humans work better with AI — Sherry's work challenges us to rethink both sides of the equation.