It'll be very useful for even local setups when the data needs to be confidential. Look at the research related to medical training of llms (ignore their current lack of direct usefulness/trustworthiness, those are potentially solvable), with a homomorphically encrypted session, the large inference servers never see hipaa protected data in a way that exposes it if the server is compromised even if its an on premises setup in your doctors office processing the data, reducing risk of the data leaking anywhere.

Thanks a lot. Though encrypted AI chat bot is not far ahead, do not think of that as the primary target of today. Instead, there are many untapped applications (e.g. inter-bank transfers, industry, healthcare) where regulations, privacy laws and compliance requirements restrict institutions from touching data. These will initially be our key enablers, and over time we hope to extend the range of applications.