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Practical AI

Creating a private AI assistant in Thunderbird

Sep 23, 2025 · 53 min · Episode 329 · 51.3 MB
0:00-53:08

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In this episode, Daniel and Chris are joined by Chris Aquino, software engineer at Thunderbird to hear the story of how they developed a privacy-preserving AI executive assistant. They discuss various design decisions including remote (but confidential) inference, local encryption, and model selection. Chris A. does an amazing job describing the journey from "let the big LLM do everything" to splitting apart the workflow to be handled by multiple models. 

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