Proton's very biased article on Deepseek
Article: https://proton.me/blog/deepseek
Calls it "Deepsneak", failing to make it clear that the reason people love Deepseek is that you can download and it run it securely on any of your own private devices or servers - unlike most of the competing SOTA AIs.
I can't speak for Proton, but the last couple weeks are showing some very clear biases coming out.
I hate AI but on the other hand I love how Deepseek is causing AI companies to lose billions.
The desperate PR campaign against deepseek is also very entertaining.
Billionaires are really pissed about it, I’m happy.
We're playing with it at work and I honestly don't understand the hype. It's super verbose and would take longer for me to read the output than do the research myself. And it's still often wrong.
It's cool I guess, and I'm still looking for a good use case, but it's still a ways from taking over the world.
DeepSeek is open source, meaning you can modify code[...] on your own app to create an independent — and more secure — version. However, using DeepSeek in its current form — as it exists today, hosted in China — comes with serious risks for anyone concerned about their most sensitive, private information.
They are not wrong here.
After having read the article fully it doesn't seem to be that partial and acknowledge also the failing of others. It is not as stupid as the CEO stance on "Republicans helping the little guys" for sure.
Wait. Protons CEO is conservative?
I will let you decide : https://theintercept.com/2025/01/28/proton-mail-andy-yen-trump-republicans/
DeepSeek is open source, but is it safe?
These guys are in the open source business themselves, they should know the answer to this question.
Has anyone actually analyzed the source code thoroughly yet? I've seen a ton of reporting on its open source nature but nothing about the detailed nature of the source.
FOSS only = safe if the code has been audited in depth.
I haven't looked into Deepseek specifically so I could be mistaken, but a lot of times when a model is called "open-source" it really is just open weights. You can download it or train other models off of it, but you can't actually view any kind of source code on how the model works.
An audit isn't really possible.
A few of my friends who are a lot more knowledgeable about LLMs than myself are having a good look over the next week or so. It'll take some time, but I'm sure they will post their results when they are done (pretty busy times unfortunately).
I'll do my best to remember to come back here with a link or something when I have more info 😊
That said, hopefully someone else is also taking a look and we can get a few different perspectives.
They very much do not believe that open source means safe or private. They have a tons of articles talking about the hurdles they have gone through to try and ensure they are, and where and when they have failed to do so.
If I obfuscate my code such that it's very difficult to understand then in practice it's like proprietary software, even with an open source license.
Correct me if I'm wrong but looking at the code isn't enough to understand what a neural network will do (if these "AI" are using that, maybe they're not).
Deepseek's R1 was built entirely on a multi-stage reinforcement learning process, and they pretty much open sourced that entire pipeline. By contrast, OpenAI has been giving us nothing but "look what we did" since GPT-3, and we're supposed to trust them.
Unsurprising that a right-wing Trump supporting company is now attacking a tech that poses an existential threat to the fascist-leaning tech companies that are all in on AI.
Proton has always been sketchy - and I caught flak for it countless times, especially here. But: A company claiming they are "private' and "secure" because they operate under Swiss privacy laws is already sketchy from the beginning. Why? Because Swiss privacy laws suck,are the worst in Europe and Switzerland is a country known for multiple cases of major intelligence agency overreach - especially towards foreigners and cross-border traffic.
Legally the Swiss intelligence services can order any "service provider" (that includes proton) to provide them access to traffic coming from foreign countries - this also includes the mandate to provide "technical means", which is often seen as backdoors. And to make things better the service providers are not allowed to talk about it.
This alone is a problem. In Protons case what makes matters even worse is the fact that they are an US company de facto operating from the US and therefore are bound by the homeland security act and similar legislation.
So in the end both the Swiss and US services might read your data.
For clarity the company did not explicitly support Trump. They simply stated negative things about the "corporate dems" and praised the new republican party.
They explicitly said the Republicans were on the side of the little guy. I probably don't need to explain the awful shit that they're doing that showcases that that is not what they're doing.
Saying they're "fighting for the little guys" while at the same time shitting on their political opponent is a clear show of support.
Now I don't particularly care about the Proton CEO's opinions. My opinion of CEOs is that they're dickheads until proven otherwise. But when you publicly support this shit, and use your company's official accounts to back yourself up, it becomes a lot more egregious in my mind. And even worse when they pretend they're not actually doing that.
They didn't really praise them. They just hoped that the republicans would go back to being against big tech (like they used to be 10 years ago he claims). Obviously, Trump's not going to do that but I think we can all agree big tech is a big problem
Proton working overtime to discourage me from renewing.
Surely Proton's own AI is without any of these problems... https://proton.me/blog/proton-scribe-writing-assistant
Just because you can (pretty easily) self host it doesn’t mean that the privacy concerns aren’t valid.
I don’t think they are that biased. They say in the article that ai models from all the leading companies are not private and shouldn’t be trusted with your data. The article is focusing on Deepseek given that’s the new big thing. Of course, since it’s controlled by China that makes data privacy even less of a thing that can be trusted.
Should we trust Deepseek? No. Should we trust OpenAI? No. Should we trust anything that is not developed by an open community? No.
I don’t think Proton is biased, they are explaining the risks with Deepseek specifically and mention how Ai’s aren’t much better. The article is not titled “Deepseek vs OpenAI” or anything like that. I don’t get why people bag on proton when they are the biggest privacy focused player that could (almost) replace google for most people!
Exactly.
Also, none of the article applies if you run the model yourself, since the main risk is whatever the host does with your data. The model itself has no logic.
I would never use a hosted AI service, but I would probably use a self hosted one. We are trying a few models out at work and we're hosting it ourselves.
A quote from the article:
DeepSeek is open source, meaning you can modify code(new window) on your own app to create an independent — and more secure — version. This has led some to hope that a more privacy-friendly version of DeepSeek could be developed.
This is just plain wrong. The model doesn’t contain the privacy unfriendly logic and can be used freely and unmodified. In fact, there are plenty of other platforms available right now where you can use it that are not Chinese.
This article makes fair points, if you ignore the fact that they don’t know what they’re talking about. You need to fix the errors in your head while reading it for it to make sense. If you don’t have the knowledge to do that, the whole article is a bit misleading.
You could write this exact article about openai too
The article goes into great detail about how it's different from OpenAI so, no.
Except you can't run it.
Every model You are downloading and running is simply just a checkpoint of llama....
Quit spreading that misinformation.
You, and the grand majority of everyone else, doesn't have anywhere near the hardware to run the actual full deepseek model
I run one a of the smaller model on an M1 max and it's working pretty good. Much better than I would jave thought. Some guys on youtube manage to get the 600b parameters models to run on sub 5k hardware. It's a total game changer. In a couple of years it will probably run loccaly on phones.
failing to make it clear that the reason people love Deepseek is that you can download and it run it securely on any of your own private devices or servers
That's not why. Almost no one is going to do that. That's why they didn't mention it.
It would be fair if ChatGPT or any american service received the same treatment, but the only article I found from 2023 seems quite neutral :/
We actually it seems quite fair-ish 🤷
AI has the potential to be a truly revolutionary development, one that could drive advancement for centuries. But it must be done correctly. These companies stand to make billions of dollars in revenue, and yet they violated our privacy and are training their tools using our data without our permission. Recent history shows we must act now if we’re to avoid an even worse version of surveillance capitalism.
Also from 2023 : https://proton.me/blog/ai-gdpr
Lemmy users very biased link to article that isn't nearly as biased as they are purposefully biasing.
Maybe this community needs stricter posting guidelines to avoid this sort of drivel?
Of course it's biased. One company writing about another company is always biased. Imagine mods of one community collectively writing a post about another community, would the fact alone not be enough? Or admins of one instance about another.
It was common sense when I as a kid went online, writing all manners of awfully stupid things memories of which still haunt me today.
You'd be friendly and respectful with all people around you on the same forums and chats. But never ever would you believe them when they tell you what to think about something.
We live in a strange time when instead of applying this simple rule people are looking for mechanisms like karma or fact-checking or even market share to allow themselves to uncritically believe some stuff.
This is true. However, Proton's big sell is that they can be trusted to be truthful about what is safe and what is not safe for your privacy.
I think given the context of the CEO's personal bias towards current US Republicans, and given that those Republicans are aggressively anti-China, when Proton releases an article warning of a successful Chinese AI, and seemingly purposefully leaves out the part about how people are already running it securely, it starts raising some important questions about their alignment.
They are absolutely right! Most people don't give a fuck about hosting their own AI, they just download "Deepsneak" and chat..and it is unfortunately even worse than "ClosedAI", cuz they are based in China. Thats why I hope Duckduckgo will host deepseek on their servers (as it is very lightweight in resources, yes?), then we will all benefit from it.
Serious question, how does them being based in China make them worse? I'd much rather have a foreign intelligence agency collect data on me than one in the country in which I live. It's not like I'd get extradited to China.
I don’t see how what they wrote is controversial, unless you’re a tankie.
Yeah the article is mostly legit points that if your contacting the chatpot in China it is harvesting your data. Just like if you contact open AI or copilot or Claude or Gemini they're all collecting all of your data.
I do find it somewhat strange that they only talk about deep-seek hosting models.
It's absolutely trivial just to download the models run locally yourself and you're not giving any data back to them. I would think that proton would be all over that for a privacy scenario.
It might be trivial to a tech-savvy audience, but considering how popular ChatGPT itself is and considering DeepSeek's ranking on the Play and iOS App Stores, I'd honestly guess most people are using DeepSeek's servers. Plus, you'd be surprised how many people naturally trust the service more after hearing that the company open sourced the models. Accordingly I don't think it's unreasonable for Proton to focus on the service rather than the local models here.
I'd also note that people who want the highest quality responses aren't using a local model, as anything you can run locally is a distilled version that is significantly smaller (at a small, but non-trivial overalll performance cost).
Given that you can download Deepseek, customize it, and run it offline in your own secure environment, it is actually almost irrelevant how people feel about China. None of that data goes back to them.
That's why I find all the "it comes from China, therefore it is a trap" rhetoric to be so annoying, and frankly dangerous for international relations.
Compare this to OpenAI, where your only option is to use the US-hosted version, where it is under the jurisdiction of a president who has no care for privacy protection.
TBF you almost certainly can't run R1 itself. The model is way too big and compute intensive for a typical system. You can only run the distilled versions which are definitely a bit worse in performance.
Lots of people (if not most people) are using the service hosted by Deepseek themselves, as evidenced by the ranking of Deepseek on both the iOS app store and the Google Play store.
Why do they even have to give their goddamn opinion? Who asked? Why should they car
Anyone promoting LLMs without a big side of skepticism is exposing their bias.
Tutamail is a great email provider that takes security very seriously. Switched a few days ago and I'm very happy.
Now this is something people can be mad at
How do you know you're running anything securely? How many people have actually audited the code?
It's not active running code that can affect a system in any meaningful way. It's a model. It's like a complex series of partitioned data that is loaded and sorted through. Nothing more. It's been open sourced and poured through, and it's just a model.
Glad I steered clear of Proton, change my mind. No wait, don't.
