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Creating a private AI assistant in Thunderbird episode artwork

Sep 23, 2025 53 min

Creating a private AI assistant in Thunderbird

from Practical AI Hosted by Daniel Whitenack and Chris Benson

In this episode, Daniel and Chris are joined by Chris Aquino, software engineer at Thunderbird to hear the story of how they developed a privacy-preserving AI executive assistant. They discuss various design decisions including remote (but confidential) inference, local encryption, and model selection. Chris A. does an amazing job describing the journey from "let the big LLM do everything" to splitting apart the workflow to be handled by multiple models. Featuring: Chris Aquino – LinkedIn Chris Benson – Website, LinkedIn, Bluesky, GitHub, X Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X Links: Thunderbird Thunderbird Pro Sponsors: Shopify – The commerce platform trusted by millions. From idea to checkout, Shopify gives you everything you need to launch and scale your business—no matter your level of experience. Build beautiful storefronts, market with built-in AI tools, and tap into the platform powering 10% of all U.S. eCommerce. Start your one-dollar trial at shopify.com/practicalai Upcoming Events: Join us at the Midwest AI Summit on November 13 in Indianapolis to hear world-class speakers share how they’ve scaled AI solutions. Don’t miss the AI Engineering Lounge, where you can sit down with experts for hands-on guidance. Reserve your spot today! Register for upcoming webinars here!

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Creating a private AI assistant in Thunderbird

0:00 53:08

Chapters

  1. 0:00 Welcome to Practical AI
  2. 0:49 Meet the guest
  3. 6:49 The way people use email now
  4. 9:23 AI in email
  5. 13:39 Sponsor: Shopify
  6. 15:08 AI models
  7. 20:31 Privacy
  8. 26:28 Creating a connection with Flower
  9. 28:13 Hosting private models
  10. 34:49 Formatting
  11. 36:59 Audiences
  12. 44:14 The future question
  13. 51:40 Outro

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This episode is 53 minutes long.

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This episode was published on September 23, 2025.

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