For open-weight models, provable inference is trivial: just redo the computation! This is much faster, cheaper, and doesn't require any fancy cryptography, just deterministic inference (which, if you read carefully, the ZKP approach needs too). See https://lukechampine.com/repligraphs

Of course, it's unlikely that we'll get open-weight models from OpenAI or Anthropic any time soon. That means we have to choose between a) fancy ZKPs, b) signed responses, or c) comparing results from multiple inference providers.

Whatever method ends up being used, it's clear to me that some form of provable inference is inevitable. People haven't caught on to its more significant applications, but they will. (This post touches upon one of them: model-driven audits.) Think about it: we can prove that a particular mind authored a particular artifact. That's never been possible before! You can't prove that Melville wrote Moby Dick, for example; but you can prove that Claude wrote a poem, or that Gemini approved a pull request, or that GPT got a particular score on some eval. This is a more powerful primitive than a cryptographic signature.