Imagine having a private conversation with an AI as powerful as ChatGPT, without ever revealing your secrets to the company behind it. That's the promise of PermLLM, a groundbreaking new approach to private AI inference. Today, using services like ChatGPT involves sending your queries to external servers, exposing your potentially sensitive data. PermLLM tackles this privacy concern head-on. The core idea is ingenious: scramble your data before sending it to the AI model, perform the computation on the scrambled data, and then unscramble the results. This clever technique, based on secure random permutations, allows the AI to process your information without ever seeing the original content. Combined with other cryptographic tools, PermLLM achieves blazing-fast performance, generating responses in just three seconds per word, even over standard internet connections. This is a massive leap forward compared to existing privacy-preserving methods, which can take minutes or even hours to generate a single response. Researchers demonstrated PermLLM's power by implementing it on the open-source ChatGLM-6B model, a large language model with over six billion parameters. The results are impressive: near-instantaneous responses with no loss of accuracy, all while keeping your data private. While the current implementation focuses on a two-party model (user and AI provider), future research could explore more complex scenarios involving multiple parties. PermLLM opens exciting possibilities for secure and efficient AI inference, paving the way for a future where privacy and powerful AI go hand in hand.