[hot_gril]

What was the end result? I was almost roped into a project like this, encrypted ML for biology applications. It was definitely possible, but it seemed too slow to be worthwhile. Other federated learning projects shut down because it was wayy more efficient on a single cluster, and that was without the HE tax. I also have no idea if you can practically do HE matrix operations on a TPU or GPU or CPU SIMD at least; presumably that's something the research would cover.

Then again I didn't test very much because they also wanted it to be the proof of work for a blockchain, a possibility that I didn't discount but also figured it'd be extremely hard and I wasn't the guy to do it.