My master's thesis is on a topic in this field (Privacy Preserving ML) and from my understanding HE and other techniques have very high overheads(~10^3) on inference tasks and thus aren't very commercially viable.

The article conspicuously fails to go into much detail about that. I poked around with an AI a bit (to rapidly cover all the linked pages) and it seems the best numbers we can get are from this arxiv paper: https://arxiv.org/html/2506.18150v4 Which says:

"We evaluate HE-LRM on UCI (health prediction) and Criteo (click prediction), achieving inference latencies of 24 seconds on UCI and 228 to 489 seconds, respectively, on a single-threaded CPU."

There don't seem to be any direct comparisons available, probably because nobody else has any reason to limit themselves to one single-threaded CPU with normal techniques, but for reference the AI seems to expect that normal times for conventional setups are in the milliseconds range, fairly comfortably, even on CPU. I didn't find a clean primary source to link to for this claim, but clicking through various things that don't cleanly state the situation it did seem plausible. So we seem to still be in the range of single-digit orders of magnitude slower, possibly as much as 5 or 6, which is to say, we're still talking the range where we need to take the log of the difference to get sensible numbers, we're not using percentages.

(To run it yourself, I basically just fed the URL from the HN link, mentioned that FHE is known to be slow, and asked if anything linked in the blog post gave concrete times.)

Do you think that’s like a fundamental limit or something that will improve with time and new algorithms?

That's the reason for HEIR like optimization and parameter selection.

It narrows the 10^3 - 10^6 penalty to 10x - 100x.

1000x slowdown is bad but not a complete deal breaker. Do you have a sense of what a reasonable achievable factor is? Do you have sense for how long before we get to that achievable factor?

Exactly my concern, and worse overhead that what I recalled.

Cost-wise the only viable private compute is local compute. It's more expensive than cloud, but true private compute in the cloud is definitely pricier.