Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin argues that local AI can protect your privacy without losing speed

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin says laptop AI is approaching a practical turning point. Wallet software still needs a much higher bar before it can hand an AI control over crypto assets.He said on Sept. 17 that Qwen 3.8 Flash and recent improvements in llama.cpp had brought local models close to handling a “large share” of tasks on his Strix Halo laptop.For more advanced work, he described a local model coordinating requests to stronger remote systems while withholding the user's full personal context.The benchmark image attached to the post showed 10 workloads. Its reported input-processing rates ranged from 109.82 to 373.22 tokens per second, while output generation ranged from 18.42 to 33.37 tokens per second.Those figures support a practical claim about responsiveness on one high-end laptop. They leave model judgment, resistance to malicious instructions, and transaction authorization unanswered.Local inference can improve privacy while the power to move funds remains behind separate, enforceable controls.Ethereum co-founder shows what changed between April and SeptemberIn an April account of his local AI setup, Vitalik described a narrower role for laptop models.He wrote ...