Jonathan Mortensen

@southpkcommons Founder Fellowship

[Jonathan Mortensen @jmomort]

@adityaag OSS is arguably just a public token cache now

[Jonathan Mortensen @jmomort]

Finally! Impressive physics and engineering by @aidaxbaradari for giving folks the ability to speak freely without worrying about being recorded

[Aida Baradari @aidaxbaradari]

Today, we're introducing Spectre I, the first smart device to stop unwanted audio recordings.

We live in a world of always-on listening devices.

Smart devices and AI dominate our world in business and private conversations.

With Deveillance, you will @be_inaudible.

[Jonathan Mortensen @jmomort]

@robechun @aidaxbaradari @be_inaudible I'm working on that: checkout https://t.co/vMlKeVCXpU

[Aditya Agarwal @adityaag]

The goal @southpkcommons is to build maximally ambitious companies.

Take some time to find the right mountain. Don't confuse motion for progress.

Our first 10 years have been strong. Now we get to to go build the next decade.

This article captures us well:

[Jonathan Mortensen @jmomort]

@mweinbach There is now https://t.co/3ZRqv4oxAL which is Apache 2.0 and does private inference via anonymity as well as confidential computing. It’s multi-cloud, multi-GPU, can do bare-metal, enterprise scalable, low-latency, and based on Apple’s PCC architecture

[Jonathan Mortensen @jmomort]

suggest folks checkout the more popular https://t.co/xHcEQIJloh which is Apache 2.0 and does private inference via anonymity as well as confidential computing. You need both. It’s multi-cloud, multi-GPU, can do bare-metal, enterprise scalable, low-latency, and based on Apple’s PCC

[Jonathan Mortensen @jmomort]

@WriteAheadLog Oops

[Jonathan Mortensen @jmomort]

When we launched Confident Security I said, "you bring the models, we bring the privacy".

Now ANYONE can bring the models - check out OpenPCC, the new standard for private AI inference.

[Confident Security @confident_sec]

Introducing OpenPCC - open-source AI Privacy

No tracking. No training. No leaks. Just provably private infrastructure for AI.

Check out the repo, announcement, and whitepaper in the comments - hit us with a star while you're there!

[Jonathan Mortensen @jmomort]

I learned about OHTTP (RFC 9458) in 2024 while reading Apple’s PCC post and then realized how important it is to privacy on the Internet. Turns out, a lot of folks use it: Mozilla, Apple, Google, Meta, and ISRG, the creators of Let’s Encrypt, to name a few.

OHTTP is critical at CONFSEC for making privacy guarantees to our customers. We couldn’t find an OHTTP library in Go that suited our needs so, of course, we wrote our own. It uses bhttp+twoway under the hood, which we just opened sourced over the past few weeks. So, now you can see how these three libraries all come together – BHTTP for encapsulating the HTTP request, twoway for encrypting requests and the chunked responses, and OHTTP for orchestrating it all.

If you want to build OHTTP into your product, you’ll need the help of @fastly , https://t.co/SUXlEFJXnr, or @Cloudflare to make it happen – there are no other relay providers I’ve found.

Thank you to @fastly @willemschots @corylanou for helping us make this happen! And, Martin Thomson, Tommy Pauly, Christopher Wood for authoring the specs.

[Confident Security @confident_sec]

Go check out go-nvtrust, our open-source Go library for NVIDIA GPU/NVSwitch confidential attestation.

If you've Got problems securing your AI privacy, Go no further, this library will be your Go-to solution.

How many Go puns can we fit in this sentence? Better question: where are we Going with all of these open-source releases?

[Jonathan Mortensen @jmomort]

Notably absent from almost all FHE benchmarks is the baseline of no encryption. If you're not providing in the cost and time difference between the baseline, you're misleading folks. The decision to use an enclave vs FHE has to do with threat model, amount of data, budget, risk tolerance, etc.

Even if you're 1e6x faster than before, you're still 1e9x slower than regular old (non-SIMD) addition on a CPU (114/s vs 3e9/s). And that's not including the 40x higher cost of running a GPU just to do encrypted data processing. So, maybe 10 orders of magnitude...

[Jonathan Mortensen @jmomort]

When @MikeMcCormick_ and I first connected, I knew we were aligned immediately. He's been quick to jump in and help with introductions and thinking about the market. Excited to join on this journey!

[Mike McCormick @MikeMcCormick_]

Exactly two years ago, I launched @HalcyonFutures.

So far we’ve seeded and launched 16 new orgs and companies, and helped them raise nearly a quarter billion dollars in funding.

Flash back to 2022: After eight years in VC, I stepped back to explore questions about exponential technology and the future of humanity.

Then ChatGPT launched – we’d entered the exponential AI era.

The upside of AI is huge – but so are the risks: misalignment, loss of control, cyber and bio-threats, fraud, adversarial misuse, and more.

For humanity to thrive in this era, we’ll need to build a resilient and secure world.

And we’ll need an ecosystem of both nonprofit and for-profit solutions led by ambitious, thoughtful leaders from business, policy, academia and media.

I found myself asking:

1. How do we get the world’s most talented people working on these civilization-scale challenges?

2. What funding model would allow us to support many different types of projects?

With those questions in mind, I launched Halcyon. We’re building something a bit unusual:

- @HalcyonFutures, a nonprofit and grant fund that helps leaders and entrepreneurs pivot to ambitious, high-impact work.

- @HalcyonVC, a VC firm backing for-profit founders tackling the hardest problems in AI security and global resilience.

So far we’ve raised $25m in funding for Halcyon’s nonprofit and VC fund.

We’ve incubated or provided zero-to-one capital to 16 nonprofits and companies, and helped them go on to raise more than $200m — from @GoodfireAI's interpretability work to @aiunderwriting's AI risk standards and insurance, @TransluceAI's model behavior research, and @SeismicOrg's public opinion research and media.

We're a small team of three (me, Shelby Summerfield and @rossmatican) surrounded by a community of advisors and allies that includes leaders from frontier labs, governments, cybersecurity, philanthropy, startups and VC.

Over the coming weeks we’ll share more about Halcyon and what we’re building next.

If you're working on something we might be excited about, say hi. Visit our website below in comments ⬇️

[Mike McCormick @MikeMcCormick_]

Exactly two years ago, I launched @HalcyonFutures.

So far we’ve seeded and launched 16 new orgs and companies, and helped them raise nearly a quarter billion dollars in funding.

Flash back to 2022: After eight years in VC, I stepped back to explore questions about exponential technology and the future of humanity.

Then ChatGPT launched – we’d entered the exponential AI era.

The upside of AI is huge – but so are the risks: misalignment, loss of control, cyber and bio-threats, fraud, adversarial misuse, and more.

For humanity to thrive in this era, we’ll need to build a resilient and secure world.

And we’ll need an ecosystem of both nonprofit and for-profit solutions led by ambitious, thoughtful leaders from business, policy, academia and media.

I found myself asking:

1. How do we get the world’s most talented people working on these civilization-scale challenges?

2. What funding model would allow us to support many different types of projects?

With those questions in mind, I launched Halcyon. We’re building something a bit unusual:

- @HalcyonFutures, a nonprofit and grant fund that helps leaders and entrepreneurs pivot to ambitious, high-impact work.

- @HalcyonVC, a VC firm backing for-profit founders tackling the hardest problems in AI security and global resilience.

So far we’ve raised $25m in funding for Halcyon’s nonprofit and VC fund.

We’ve incubated or provided zero-to-one capital to 16 nonprofits and companies, and helped them go on to raise more than $200m — from @GoodfireAI's interpretability work to @aiunderwriting's AI risk standards and insurance, @TransluceAI's model behavior research, and @SeismicOrg's public opinion research and media.

We're a small team of three (me, Shelby Summerfield and @rossmatican) surrounded by a community of advisors and allies that includes leaders from frontier labs, governments, cybersecurity, philanthropy, startups and VC.

Over the coming weeks we’ll share more about Halcyon and what we’re building next.

If you're working on something we might be excited about, say hi. Visit our website below in comments ⬇️

[Jonathan Mortensen @jmomort]

@daraladje @JonhernandezIA @withdelphi So, nothing private is shared with any sub-processor?

[Jonathan Mortensen @jmomort]

@tjparker Working on this. Plan to OSS. checkout https://t.co/vMlKeVCXpU

[Jonathan Mortensen @jmomort]

@brave Does this use Claude via bedrock?

[Jonathan Mortensen @jmomort]

@shivan_kaul via bedrock?

[Jonathan Mortensen @jmomort]

@matthew_d_green Grim. I’m building @confident_sec to handle the LLM privacy side of things. Apple did a pretty good job with PCC and we’re building it for everyone else.

[Jonathan Mortensen @jmomort]

@bernhardsson No joke: I saw an ad on reddit for https://t.co/8mHEm8IvYd and it provides some convincing arguments for minimizing the time delta between sunrise and 7am and minimizing the number of time shifts due to the high costs.