Ziroh Labs onboards Turing Awardee as its chief technologist

Indian deeptech startup Ziroh Labs has announced the appointment of Dr Whitfield Diffie as its chief technologist. This appointment will help Ziroh Labs in the next phase of its development, with an emphasis on decentralisation, accessibility, and scalability. 

Diffie, a renowned technologist, is a Turing Award winner for the creation of public-key cryptography.  His co-invention of public-key cryptography in 1976 solved the long-standing problem of secure key distribution, allowing cryptographic networks to be scaled to internet dimensions. This achievement earned Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman, his advisor at Stanford, the 2015 ACM Turing Award. This award is considered the highest distinction the field of computer science.

Diffie has been the Manager of Secure Systems Research at the laboratory of the Canadian telephone system and retiring as a Sun Fellow and Chief Security Officer of Sun Microsystems. Since leaving Sun, he has served as VP for Information Security and Cryptography at ICAAN, and continued a close association with the Centre for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford that he began in the late 1990s. Diffie studied mathematics at MIT and started his career with research in both the MIT and Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratories.

Ziroh Labs said that the alliance will help combine its AI democratisation efforts using CPU with Diffie's work in making cryptography available to all. Throughout his career, Diffie has addressed complex challenges to information security and trust in the digital world, the company added. 

“Modern AI and public-key cryptography have an important thing in common: both are mathematical technologies that work best when they are directly serving the individual. Although Dr Diffie is renowned for leading a worldwide movement to make cryptography accessible to all, his involvement in AI began at its nascent stage when Diffie worked alongside two of its founders: Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy. For us, at Ziroh Labs, there is no joy greater than the opportunity to work with him,” said Hrishikesh Dewan, Co-founder and CEO of Ziroh Labs.

The IIT Madras-incubated startup created a lot of buzz earlier this year when it demonstrated a CPU-based AI platform that is capable of running large AI models without the need for expensive GPUs, called Kompact AI. It has been optimised for models like DeepSeek, Qwen, and Llama, demonstrating efficient performance on standard CPU hardware. With this approach, Ziroh Labs claims that it has been able to cut down inference costs by 50%.