Skip to content

How private LLM inference actually works

August 7, 2026 · 1 h 24 min

Show notes

In this podcast episode James Wilson chats with Tinfoil co-founder Tanya Verma about how you can run a powerful LLM in the cloud without the inference provider seeing your prompts.

Tanya talks James through how private inference works, from trusted execution environments and hardware attestation, to TLS termination and GPU isolation. Customers can verify the exact code and model processing their data, while Tinfoil and its infrastructure providers remain locked out.

That’s clever engineering… but who really needs it? Is private inference only useful if you’re doing something bad, or will it become a privacy baseline like TLS? James and Tanya discuss the costs and trade-offs, and how open weights make private inference more transparent and trustworthy.

Show notes

    All episodes of Risky Business Features

    Settings

    Display

    Language

    Decides which stations you see first on the home page.

    History

    Recently played stations and episodes and your latest searches are only stored in this browser.

    Notifications

    A short notice when a podcast you follow has a new episode. Turn off single podcasts with the bell on their page.

    Account

    Save favorites – in the app and on the website.

    Keyboard shortcuts

    /
    Open search
    Space
    Play or pause
    ← →
    In the player: back 15 s, forward 30 s (episodes) · in a row: next tile
    ↑ ↓
    In a row: target within the tile
    Home / End
    In a row: first or last tile
    Esc
    Close window or menu
    ?
    This overview
    Now playing

    Go to station page

    Play next

      Add episodes with “Play next” – they play after the current episode.