Episode 278 - The State of ZK with Anna and Kobi

Transcript

[Music] welcome to zero knowledge I'm your host Anna Rose in this podcast we will be exploring the latest in zero knowledge research and the decentralized web as well as new paradigms that promise to change the way we interact and transact online [Music] this week Kobe and I have a conversation about the state of ZK the last time we did an episode like this was back in January so it felt like a good time to catch up about what has happened in our ecosystem since then in this conversation we highlight some recent zika applications new uses for ZK such as off-chain computation and ID we chat

about Recent research breakthroughs some new trends we open up the topic of ZK and security and we have a chance to finally chat about zkpod.ai but we ran out of time for that last bit so we'll do another episode dedicated to the zkpod.ai project soon now I doubt we covered everything and we'd love to hear from you if you think that we should highlight some other new use cases or new ideas in the ZK space get in touch on Twitter at xeronowledge FM or find us in our telegram group we've added the links to these in the show notes now Tanya will share a little bit about this week's sponsors foreign ever feel like developing zero knowledge proofs is a daunting task while the team at risk zero is here to remind you that it doesn't have to be that way they're

out of the box tooling allows developers to access the magic of ZK proofs from any chain without needing to learn custom languages or build custom ZK circuits Bonsai risk Zero's most anticipated product is a proving Marketplace that enables any protocol or application to leverage fast CK proofs in languages like rust go and C plus visit r0.link forward slash ZK podcast to learn more and sign up for the Bonsai wait list you can also find the link in our show notes Elio is a new layer 1 blockchain that achieves the programmability of ethereum the privacy of zcash and the scalability of a roll-up if you're interested in building private applications then check out

Elio's programming language called Leo Leo enables non-cryptographers to harness the power of zkps to deploy decentralized exchanges hidden information games regulated stable coins and more visit developer.alio.org to learn more for questions join their Discord at elio.org forward slash Discord so thanks again Elio and now here's our episode [Music] so I'm here today with Kobe my very often co-host uh Hey Kobe hi so today you're not gonna be a co-host necessarily instead we're going to do sort of a conversation with an update of the state of ZK and we want to properly introduce for the first time zkpod.ai

which we've teased but haven't fully dove into we actually have a lot to get through so I hope we get to talk a lot about that so let's kick off what's new in ZK what are the ideas of projects that are catching your attention yeah I think that a lot of interesting things have happened so we see both a lot of new use cases being deployed which is interesting so you know we've seen many first DK VMS last year and now we we see other use cases which use very heavy complex snarks being deployed things like secret Bridges and storage proofs and so on which is really

cool to see these are becoming a reality and probably into these capabilities that people would not have imagined possible a couple of years ago wow which is cool yeah yeah I think like what in one of the episodes that that was on before we were talking about this concept of collaborative snarks I think it was in the episode with them actually yeah I think so too what was that again so collaborative snarks is the concept of combining NPC and snarks or more correctly making verifiable NPC does this sort of mean like that you'd have like multiple people acting as the prover or the verifier would you split one of these roles into multiple roles yeah

essentially that's what it means but even more than that so it's not only to make let's say splitting the approver for efficiency but it's also splitting the proverb for privacy so each different prover would hold a different part of the witness and then you generally do a computation and then you finally get a result like you do in any NPC but you can also prove the correctness of the computation to a third party which is a really really cool concept and I totally expect to see many more interesting users of it what do you think that actually opens up what would a collaborative snark do really yeah so

so for example one idea that you could think about is that you have all these games that have secret information so like Dark Forest let's say and in those games you can imagine two parties having some armies with some properties and these armies fight each other but you know you don't want to reveal your entire position of your army perhaps and you then fight you get some results you get the outcome of who won and what happened to the final composition of each of the different armies yeah and then you can update the individual

states without exposing any more information so for example for single information gaming I think it could be pretty cool and one other use case that we've seen that actually got deployed or more correctly is in the process of being deployed is around trading or dexes which I think is what regulatory is working on okay so that seems pretty pretty new nice this is helpful I think when we covered it it was actually very much just on like how it was constructed not necessarily what use cases would come out of it so that's cool to think of yeah and I think we've yet to see the most interesting use cases like it's just starting people are getting used to

thinking about it even that combination to intro like you you know you just gave a combination of MPC nzk which we had heard about for years but this is kind of like a very unique version of it I know I pretty recently had sunscreen on where we were talking about ZK and fhe and I had not actually realized before that point that there's a lot of efforts to try to combine those things to find potentially like lattice based zkps that could work in an fhe system I I guess in that case and from what I got from the interview still early days so I don't know that there's applications that can like count on this yet but it's really cool to see that development right like you know six months ago we were talking

about this collaborative snarks as an idea and now you actually start to have people brainstorming on what that means yeah exactly and then I think you're you'll also make a good point for example What sanctuary sunscreen is doing is very interesting because well when you have fhc by itself you you just have some computation but you know can you trust it was the correct computation that's that's a problem and ZK plus FHA I think is super exciting as well when it becomes practical enough I guess for sure I mean it's funny the I think sort of the way that sometimes ZK is being described now is like it's the umbrella term I think we've mentioned this actually on the show before the like ZK is just the buzzword but it actually includes MPC and threshold decryption and like like it's sort

of lumped together even though it's different I guess I mean like you'll see I mean we we do this do it too like at a ZK conference or a ZK event you'll also be incorporating these other Advanced cryptography pieces oh yeah that's a good point so yeah I mean maybe if you're looking for a partner on a dating app and you're looking for someone that knows ZK you can also suggest NPC it's totally I kind of want to Circle back into research search or maybe development where are we at with tooling you know I want to constantly do check-ins I feel like zika hack Lisbon was a bit of a checking point because there we could see like what tools existed that people could build with but yeah what are you seeing in terms of tooling yeah I think that's a really

good topic because developer tooling has made a big leap this year in terms of Decay that is we see some secret languages becoming really convenient to use and even Deployable for example if we're looking at Noir with Aztec 3 they keep adding interesting feature for example I think they recently added the ZK ecdsa circuit that opens up a whole world of private smart contracts which were previously very complex to develop I think the only relevant maybe convenient tooling that you had for something similar would have been with snarky JS okay I was going to say a

circum there but yeah yeah second for me maybe if you wanted to to deploy to an L1 or not enjoy something like a recursive proof but yeah Noir is maybe one level up in ergonomics which is cool like I'm glad to see the development and we're seeing also a lot of new designs for languages so a few new VMS like clerk which you know with the use of of all the recent techniques that people have been excited about like folding schemes and efficient recursive proofs you can create all these very efficient VMS

and that opens up a new world in terms of how to analyze security of zika languages but also to go back in some sense to previous paradigms of programming and you know just writing programs in imperative ways rather than all of these weird circuit-like programming techniques and that that improves both security aspects but also convenience that's cool so yeah that's really cool and and I think we've seen we've seen the success of this approach even in zika hack Lisbon I think for example a lot of people enjoyed working

with the risk zero tooling so they were just wrote thrust and I remember one presentation that I've seen where people even deployed by a mistake to easy evm oh yeah and that that's really cool like that's a big success because because it's easy KVM and it was just emulating everything perfectly yeah then they just didn't even know they were working against it so I think we we're seeing some success of adding more and more convenience to developers which I think will do a lot of good it's funny because like the way I sort of see the trajectory of use cases privacy was the first one

identified and it has the longest lifespan we see actually now ZK for privacy used in so many ways but you know it used to be like ZK for token privacy but now it's CK for XYZ privacy here their ml like it doesn't matter sometimes it's off the blockchain then we saw the scaling boom which I guess was like 2019 2020 where people realized for the scaling well now you see it in you see it happening that's the thing now we see the implementations come live um so that's exciting but there are these like new interesting spaces and you've already mentioned collaborative snarks you kind of hinted at the bridges stuff I wanted to bring up an area that like I still don't know what to call I

had Yi sun on recently to talk about Axiom I put them in this category which is ZK plus I don't know exactly what to call these types of tools and there's a few teams doing this kind of thing so I know there's Herodotus there's LaGrange Labs Axiom and I don't know if you can put risk zero in that category this is something I'm still trying to figure out but I'll just sort of quote ye here where he called it a co-processor so this is like action happening off chain which can also interact with other parts of the blockchain in his in the case of Axiom it's it's interacting with the actual consensus layer bringing information back into smart contracts which they can't see directly because you can go into history and stuff like

that but yeah would you actually Kobe this is sort of a question for you but would you put risk zero in the category or do you think if it is something else I think that's a really it's a really good question in the sense that maybe you could use risk zero for such a thing but maybe you could also use other techniques as well so for example let me make it clear so with the code processor stuff then you rely on all of these data structures that let's say exist on ethereum right like State roots and such and then you do some moving computation and you're able to prove that they were correct because you have the state route and you can link to it from your proof right

I guess risk zero is a piece of tooling that could be optimized towards such a use case definitely but you know the basic premise of risk zero itself is to allow you to use traditional languages or more correctly anything that targets risk five as a compilation Target so I would think that this could be a very interesting Avenue for zero developers but it's probably not limited to that and I guess it also might not be like made specifically for this kind like it's it might not be the most efficient way to do it uh yeah but it may be very convenient okay so this is a trade-off that I think people can play

with today especially with Hardware acceleration so you you can definitely start giving up on making the most optimized circuit and just throw it to some powerful Hardware to do it for you and which is good I think I think that's healthy and I think that that's great it opens it up to many more developers and I'm also excited about the the co-processor stuff it's definitely uses what blockchains already do best which making everything verifiable even if you have to run it yourself right now since it's verifiable by people it could also be verifiable by proof I I think that offloading to

snarks is exactly what they were good for traditionally so wow I'm very happy to see to see the development that's so nice the way you just said that like taking what was verifiable by people to make it verifiable by proofs that's so cool we still have not named this category which was just the beginning of this question and I'm so I don't know what to call these I mean so Axiom uses the word coprocessor but I also did hear from Dave oja that like he was like no it's the wrong word for what this is so I like I'm trying to figure out if there is some category there and what else might be in it like do we put the bridges back into this as well I know that they have some similar

characteristics good question I'm not sure it would you know I think that in the case of bridges you you still have some Oracle aspect there so for example in in storage proofs you have some Encore you can rely on which is the storage route that you can access from the Block header yeah and you have an old code that can get this for you in the smart contract but in the previous case you still have some kind of entity or some kind of player that needs to tell you this is the latest state in the previous blockchain in some sense they can always lie but maybe philosophically you could also say

that about about storage proofs if you're looking at it is a light client because you know maybe there is someone making an attack on you and you just see some state of the blockchain so it's hard to decide I guess so but you still don't have a name we just don't have a name off chain something something encode of chain computation anchored off chain computation okay it's not like a senator or something um yeah I'm not senate or whatever Congress person that's funny um so let's continue on our new use

cases interesting ways that DK gets used what are some other kind of areas that that you're kind of paying attention to around maybe some use cases or like just interesting ways of using ZK yeah so I think you mentioned like very very rightfully that we've seen a lot of views for token privacy for ZK traditionally and now we're seeing a lot of let's say non-financial privacy uses and I think this kind of private information retrieval aspect is super interesting if you abbreviate it it's PIR that is a technique that allows you to let's say that you hold the database and I want to read something from your

database but I don't want you to see what I'm reading so that's that's what this technique gives you and this has not been extremely practical when you were considering the cryptographic variants of it like when you have a single server that's holding a database because you you have variants where they they had like non-colluding servers which is maybe not such a realistic assumption but now you have cryptographic variants where you have a single server holding an entire database and you can already query it privately and that I think is becoming the technique that is both efficient like

you had a few very interesting papers just the last two years and we even have things that are live today that you can use and this opens up use cases such as light client privacy you know today is a light client when you let's use a wallet with metamask or or any other wallet then if you're not running your own full node you're giving away a lot of your activity or at least what you're interested in even before making a transaction to some other node it's because the node operator can actually see the query yeah exactly like they can see what you're you're asking it right

um you just have headers and now you're getting the actual data so you can verify it but you actually give away all of your queries and there's a lot of round trips that you make like I I remember that when when I was helping out some wallet product that that's that's valuable you know both both in the sense of Mev for example but also in the sense of just privacy you don't really want people to track what you're doing even if it's just reading and this this technique can prevent that like imagine that if you had the entire state of the blockchain available to you to read without anyone being able to do that to to see what you're doing that's really cool do you

not need to run a full node yourself here then no does the node operator need to run something special yes it's very very expensive yeah okay okay it's becoming better yeah yeah I don't think it's practical for in the entire state today but it's becoming much better cool do you think we could start seeing actually like new if there are new l1s launching could they start to incorporate this already into their designs or do you think we're still trying to like figure out what this would look like I I definitely think so I think that um there are also variants that are optimized for specific use cases and I think that new blockchains for example those that do private

transactions there you even have something that is crucial for the Privacy aspect because you have all of your secret notes that if you reveal which note you're holding let's say if it is if it's a mixer then it reveals exactly which was the address that deposited so you kind of get rid of all the Privacy benefits that you already had so any of those private transaction blockchains or those that includes methods that are similar would do well to include something like that and I think some of them do or some of them are thinking about it at least yeah so I I would love to see more of that being deployed in practice

and there is some very interesting work on it there are some groups that are working on it some companies and uh it's becoming real which which is again something that we didn't say two years ago nice I want to kind of go back to that timeline of use cases that I sort of started there with privacy and the scaling I know that like really soon after that more and more identity ideas came up obviously playing into the Privacy part of things and I know at the beginning of the year I was really excited because it was the first time I was starting to see the zkids come into a way that I was very excited like I don't know like I could use already and it wouldn't have to be quite as

technical you wouldn't have to be quite as in the weeds to actually start to get some of the benefits so what do you think is happening over that on that front well the other thing is that in contrast to before you know I I was working on ZK and identity years ago but back then you didn't have a lot of data sets that you could rely on yeah you didn't have ethereum in its all of its Glory like it is now do you kind of mean like you couldn't do very much like all it would be would be like addresses that had transacted with some others but there was no D5 products there was no like more nuanced activity okay so like you had that or that you had to rely on web 2 entities adopting some kind of

cryptographic measure yeah or cryptographic technique to sign data and to test the data is correct and authorized by them and then you could rely on it um in some proof because the the thing about identity is that you need as always some Encore to to say this is an authorized set of pieces of data that I can prove something on and I think he didn't have a lot of that a few years ago and now you do have a lot more of that and especially something that I think would become well that I hope will become more common is that websites and just organizations

will start signing data and testing the data in the cryptographic manner more and more like I think that would be really useful and there are even some standards that are thinking about how to do that and how to incorporate it everywhere yeah that that will allow you to to make proofs about your data without revealing a lot like you have to do today the thing is when you start to deal with things like identity I feel like and I mean obviously like Financial Security matters scaling super matters the value of these networks you know you want the security of these things to be really good when you go into identity you're talking I mean you're potentially talking about like the well-being of individuals

much more fundamentally Beyond just like what Financial exposure they have but like actually you know are they able to access Services they need or what have you I mean this is where you start to see like in a way it's so exciting because ZK starts to be so real and so relevant and so important and this is what we've been working on for so long and so it's great to see it do those things but also I feel like there comes with that this feeling of like are these systems ready have they been properly vetted what are we doing in terms of security like do we have to do the defy route and this sort of hyper accelerationist adversarial environments where you're just like Break Stuff hackers Break Stuff people suffer and then we get

better or is there like ways to do I don't know something preemptive this is something I'm thinking about a lot yeah good good question I think in some sense it's very similar to traditional security in the sense that you have to to get smarter about it and you have to learn all the techniques on how to hack things which I think like that's one of the reasons I was happy that we created DK act yeah but there's also something new here that maybe even with the hyper acceleration is throughout you have something unique that if your your system for example incorporates privacy then you might not even know there was a hack for a lot of time

so that that kinda sucks but I think that we are getting a lot better at auditing we have a lot more Auditors now it's still not enough yeah like still the market is very hot for those if anyone you know is thinking of a career change we need Auditors over here yeah pay is good I think you've got paid well yeah if you're good yeah yeah but I think Auditors are getting better and we even see some educational programs just for Auditors I loved that yeah I think there's there is a um I think they're calling it like a ZK auditor Fellowship

so they're actually trying to you know give people the tools to actually be able to audit these systems not necessarily like I guess build them or not the way that other training has gone it's much more like how to spot the problems and how to how to break them how do you teach that though I mean other options here would be like bug bounties or like making competitions to break things and stuff like that yeah I think that for example this General ZK auditing is great but you also have specific ZK auditing style education I think I've heard about one of these efforts for example for the polygons AVM I think you know they were teaching a group of people how the code base looks like so that

they will audit the the whole thing better because it's extremely complex and I think that would help a lot generally because snugs today are very very complex especially those that use Planck but yeah I think that beyond what we we do at DK hack for example that we we like to maybe focus on some of the let's say uh unexpected aspects of protocols that we when you solve the puzzle you say this should not even have been possible I'm now scared of portography there are some other competitions like

other ctfs that that do some ZK stuff that show you how to break circuits that looks like circuits that are in the wild or how to try to spot patterns which is something that is useful when you're doing things like reverse engineering in the traditional world so I think that competitions are also becoming a bit different which helps develop more security mindset having all of these efforts so that's good yeah one of the things I've been thinking a lot about is just how what the incentives in general for folks are

because I mean I think yeah there's people who want to get into it professionally because they want to get the career and and the cash but I think there's a lot of people who get a kick out of just being kind of like like the Auditors I've met I feel like a lot of them there's a there's a certain like competitive Spirit of like it's just really fun to be right and to like know stuff that other people don't know to be smart and like but like that's awesome that's in like if that is a motivator Beyond money that's a fantastic motivation that's amazing so I wonder like how do you reward that better and I like you know a lot of hackers especially if you're talking maybe those who like live more in the gray gray areas like they're very add-on so they can get I guess some cred to

their add-on but they also don't necessarily want to be known do you know what I mean like there's this funny sense of like they want to be anonymous but a lot of the credit I think comes within their peers but I did wonder like if there's a way to actually reward when when it's done really well and when it's you know saves people like a ton of pain I think this should be really rewarded so what do you have in mind like things like bug bounties well that's see I always find I mean bug bounties is one thing I I just know that like this is something I'm thinking about I think I might have even mentioned it already on a show like on a previous episode and I'd love to have other people thinking about this and I'd like to start experimenting more like I

always kind of go to like the maybe we could do some sort of pool of funds maybe like something in zprize could be used okay so I'm actually on the steering committee for that now and that was something I had suggested like maybe we could create some sort of way to like reward these things at the same time how do you judge these and how do they compete against one another like what's you know who wins that pot unless you're very very specific about like the bug you're trying to find I think that's maybe the challenge yeah you know but what worries me is that even if you solve this question which is already hard in itself but maybe you know you can develop some algorithm or some criteria to decide but even if you solve this

then you know maybe you incentivize people enough to reveal some class of bugs or bugs that are worth an x amount of cash that's it but what about the really bad bugs the one that if you see it on on them for a year then you can get a lot of money out then in that case you're in this in a similar boat of the problem with the security argument for things like multi-sig Bridges what if the incentive for the the ones that are managing the multisigs are not as big as what the bridge holds

this Wars me because the stakes can become really really big and the bug Bounty cannot uncover everything in that manner if you look at it ratially just in terms of money right I would almost also like to hear a report though on the success of the hackers in the really brutal hacks at actually getting their funds fully out that's a good point because from what I've heard from some of the more I mean since last summer or so I feel like the ones that we've heard about and if you tracked them over time there is these recoveries that have happened people sometimes like who if especially if there's multiple hackers some of them just giving it back because they realized all of a sudden

they're dealing with funds that are in a way very tainted and potentially traceable and I think generally like also the systems of enforcement to catch that is potentially getting better yeah so I that's why I would love to like offer kind of a ramp to the folks who have this kind of info to to just properly share it in order to actually but still be really rewarded like to be highlighted you know so people understand that they could have done or there could have been like a much worse thing um but they chose this route which is really ethical yeah I want to get through two more things and then we have to jump into zkpod.ai which is one of the reasons we wanted to do this episode

yeah um one is I want to just give a quick highlight of some research phenomenon I've actually done a few episodes on this already just now just recently and so that's the kind of work that's been happening on accumulation schemes or folding schemes Kobe in prep for this you gave kind of a good quote that I'm just going to repeat here but it's uh that last year was all about lookups and this year is all about I called it accumulation I think you call it more folding but yeah like I don't know if I if we've actually chatted about this on the air what are you are you excited about this what do you see coming yeah I'm I'm very excited about this I think that yeah the year of folding is becoming super

interesting maybe even since you made the last episode I don't know if if that was already out but there were very recent papers like protostar and others yeah there's a lot of progress happening for sure so I just I just had hypernova on where we talked about the Spartan Nova Supernova hypernova and I I will soon have protostar I hope on the show as well see I'm trying to cover this because it is really exciting work yeah and it's coming in quick succession um so that sort of shows like um I don't know at least like a circling in around a technique yeah I'm really excited about this for a few reasons one is just the fact that it can give you a lot

of efficiency where previously we're thinking about things like recursive snarks where you would incur a lot of overhead in making the recursive step each time and we've already seen this in other forms like we've seen this Atomic accumulation that you have inhaled to we've seen split accumulation I think I've seen that folding schemes can be cast to split accumulation as well so those two are really interesting because they differ a lot of the hard computations to the end so I'm really excited to see how much efficiency they can bring I think I've heard from some people that

it might even rival some of the most efficient techniques that we have today like Starks even and so that's really exciting especially with the paradigms that we're working on today like ZK VMS and other protocols that have repeated computation maybe even zkml so it fits very nicely with what we want to do with the circuits that we want to write and it might bring us a lot of performance benefits so that's something that I'm really looking forward to see and I think we don't have a lot of those

ready to use even we have a lot of papers but we don't have a lot of implementations yet they're coming fast though yeah I hope so all right you just mentioned zkml this leads us into you know one something we wanted to talk about on the show I mean zkml is a it's a topic in and of itself and back when I I think we were first hearing about it it wasn't necessarily seen as like potentially viable but there are actually use cases nowadays there's I know that there's this um library or I don't know what you'd call this tool set Ezekiel which people are actually starting to I mean they use this in hackathons yes

they're starting to actually play with this like zkml interface I I find the I always like I can see it in my mind and when I pronounce it it always doesn't match up Ezekiel it's as e Z how does it work KL yeah let's talk a little bit about some like cool ZK ml interfa like interactions yeah maybe it's a preface I think one model that that they have in my mind when I'm thinking about zkml in general why do you ZK right like usick for efficiency or usick for privacy or things like that right and this ml aspect of it is not super special in the zkaness of it in the

sense that sure maybe you have some large computation that is coincidentally an ml model that you want to evaluate with some inputs um so sure you maybe want to do this efficiently but sometimes you also want to hide the model for example like we have with open Ai and they don't reveal what is the model for gpt4 and that would be a privacy use of zkml but we have some unique challenges when you're thinking about models and and such because when you write functions you can make them public a lot of times and nothing bad will happen for example if you just do a computation on storage proofs or Miracle trees or

whatever that's very deterministic not nothing can change there but with ML a lot of things are unexpected like no you don't you don't know what will happen with some of the models yeah especially with these large ones and it's hard for you even as the model developer to predict what will be the output so a lot of times you do want to keep these models here and because otherwise people can find some special inputs to hack them and not hack them in the way that we we think of hacking this is just like prompt them into saying stupid right they're like doing yeah or evil yeah maybe I think that there there will be use cases where there will be value in hiding

those models and just showing that it's fair to use them so for example if you're thinking about you know you're maybe a portfolio manager for people and you want to show that you've been using some strategy all the time maybe you use a user do not trust the portfolio manager to run the same special ml model for trading that this manager runs for the clients he likes the most so this is something that you you can use such a thing for I think a lot of the fairness aspects would come into it in the real deployment and and I think maybe this was also a bit of a sad thought that

this is a lot of what you can get out of it like you can get fairness but maybe you cannot get Clarity in the sense that and I'm thinking like if we keep pulling on this portfolio thread yeah yeah um you have all of these people that are online in the non-zica world that show you how successful they were they were with some of their portfolios right and then they use this to to sell to you their services yeah and it's not only individuals it's companies as well it's Pension funds and others but those things are kind of gained right like because they have hundreds of portfolios and they show you the

successful ones but some other ones were really unsuccessful so the reason that I'm saying it's kind of sad like that maybe you could game the system in a similar manner here because you cannot provide any clarity about how the model really operates like we don't we can't really explain what the model does you can output some accuracy measures you can output some successes but you cannot gain an overall insight about it so if you don't reveal the model then you can only get some partial Assurance on its quality but if you reveal the model then you're

opening yourself to attack maybe yeah okay okay and this is where ZK comes in to potentially help no actually I think that that's the set that decay doesn't even help with that yeah pure fairness which is already good okay I think a lot of us also are in this space because we want fairness so this is already a big benefit but in some sense some people would say that you know if I trust the accuracy measures that they post maybe I could also trust them to a test rather than prove

so I think that we might see people trying to do that instead of actually proving the fairness they would use the reputation because they would say it's not a gray area it's zero or one either you have full trustlessness or no pricelessness I guess you have trust then maybe some people will say yeah there is no need for zika at all I don't think that's the case like I think eventually you do need that like you do want to enhance fairness as much as you can so that that's kind of one side of it I think and another side of it you know when you have things like private data for users but models that are more public so I

think that happens in situations when you have trusted Hardware to generate inputs that or have a specific format or that are not malicious so for example like World coin where you have the orb attesting to its readings the orb I don't like the orb or makes me uncomfortable oh yeah we have reasons but so yeah but in that case it is something that can make sure that you cannot hack a model that you can just provide it with inputs that are of some correct format that allows you to also give

users privacy so that they can run things locally and just create proofs that they run it yeah although I think there's other other issues with that particular project and the worb we wanted to on this show talk about ckpod.ai which is not zkml per se although there is a zkml experiment that we're going to be running around it we don't have too much time in the show though so why don't we just quickly introduce it and I think we're gonna have to hold on this for another part two almost or just like another episode very soon where we go into a bit more detail but let's talk a little bit about zkpod.ai

Kobe where did the idea come from uh so I think I've been holding off on getting into the whole GPT craze for a while and at some point I've seen some really cool experiments online from this person yo hey he's he's been doing really really cool experiments and I learned about the tool chain called Lang chain which is a really cool framework that kind of gives you a very neat path into getting started with doing complex things around llms it gives you the methods on how to build a quench question and answer pipelines how to use

memory how to use all of these embeddings and and such when I started using it I said that could be really cool to apply on ZK podcast but I want to add this special twist to it yeah and and the special twist was wouldn't it be really really cool if it's kind of like a podcast itself where Anna gives the answers yeah and that's when I start experimenting with voice cloning tools and I started setting you every weekend some some recordings of the same things and I was getting freaked out very much

yes um and then like I'll just I'll pick up here because at some point I think it was beginning of March that you sent me uh this clip and actually I wrote a blog post about this which is pinned on my on my Twitter but it was very much just Kofi was just writing I'm sorry and a link and the link was zkpot.ai it wasn't called that yet but it was sort of the first prototype of it where I saw that I could put in a question click a button and have my voice answer it including though like very technical answers like this voice this creation could say things that I wouldn't necessarily be able to to say or come up with as quickly and it was using all of the

transcripts from the show so it was almost like the knowledge of the guests yeah all of a sudden being channeled through my voice my very American sounding voice Club that's the one tell I don't know if there's anyone who's like any Canadians might get this but it's like there's a few things like the way it says knowledge I don't say that it that way say knowledge and there's like just these few little things that it seems to get wrong but still very creepy and totally sounds like me yeah yeah and then yeah the tool that I'm using is very tuned to American voices so for example it works really really bad for me like yeah well thank you also for putting your own voice this was sort of

the like in figuring out how to release it I was like put yourself in here too so it's not just me but they made you British it made you British it just made your voice sound British yeah it sounds really weird it's funny yeah yeah it sounds like uh like yeah it's really weird Okay so this was I think maybe our teaser into the zkpod.ai we have so much we want to share we have a whole list of topics we wanted to cover which we didn't get to in this one but I know we've run out of time so I say we we kind of end our episode here we've done the catch up on ZK and sort of the quick intro to zkpot.ai and I I want us to do another one hopefully next week we

can come back with like a more detailed ckpod.ai episode because I think it's like I think it's a very interesting evolution of this podcast in a way so I like really want people to know about it cool let's do it all right so thanks Kobe for being on and and going through this rundown with me uh thank you it was very fun cool I want to say a big thank you to the podcast team Rachel Henrik and Tanya and tour listeners thanks for listening [Music]