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.
Jesus fuckin Christ, just marry Trump at this point, Mister proton CEO.
I cancelled my Proton renewal for January and am very happy with Mullvad VPN.
Mozilla VPN runs Mullvad under the hood as well.
Goddammit I had such high hopes for Proton. Was planning on that being my post-Google main. Now what. 💀
Tutanota and Mailfence have a free tier.
Anything European-based to recommend? I’d like something as far-removed from America as possible, respecting GDPR, privacy, etc., but with a good-sized free-tier storage. I don’t think I need more than a couple GB for email. Calendar included would be a big plus as well. 😅 Probably asking for a lot here…
Guys I know OpenAI is not clear, its as bad as deepseek and even worse, BUT you have to realize, that most people don’t give a fuck about running deepseek locally, they just download deepsek app and use it, which is more privacy intrusive even than ClosedAI. Giving information to China, when you live on the west is like giving russians information, when you live in Ukraine. We are on constant war with China, because we are democratic, they are communism, and we cannot just give them our data for free, therefore I have to admit PROTON IS RIGHT about deepseek being “deepsneak”
As a queer person I don’t really care at this point if China or Russia is tracking me. They aren’t the ones who are currently stripping me and others of rights and so many other things.
I don’t trust any governments on this front, but the government I live under is way more of a concern.
Russia specifically is a big part of why trump is in power. They weren’t the sole contributors, but they definitely helped a lot. And they achieved it by buying, stealing, and collecting data on people and doing targeting misinformation campaign.
That’s… Not actually a reasonse to what was said?
Sure, that’s all fine and dandy. But it doesn’t change the point that was being made.
The election happened. Here and now, Russia and China tracking me is no different than the US. They’re all authoritarian governments hell bent on stripping rights away.
Now I’m not the same person you replied to. I’m in Canada, so I’m weary of all of them. But if I was in the states, I’d RATHER give my data to an advisory that won’t do much with it. As apposed to the current government hellbent on making life for me and my trans siblings as hard and difficult as possible.
Is China in the room with you right now?
Propaganda got ya good bud. Sure. It’s important but Jesus. Lol. ChatGPT does the same shit but doesn’t let me run it locally. Fuck ChatGPT
China is not communist, they are market-captialistic, one-party highly authoritarian state. “socialism” and “cmmunism” is just used to make them sound better and more legitimate than they are.
China isn’t communist and America isn’t democratic. They both suck way worse than that.
Since ditching Proton for Tuta and Mailbox…I haven’t missed anything and I’m saving money.
You have two email addresses in both Tuta and Mailbox? Any particular reason for that, that you could share with us? 🙏
I have two domains, one in each of Tuta and Mailbox. It was originally so I could try both out, but now I figure it doesn’t hurt to keep 'em separated. I’m still new to non-proton so I am sort of still feeling things out.
Nothing really too interesting or tricky about it, just bred out of curiosity.
Ah I see. So now to the possibly tough question, if you had to choose only one, or recommend only one of them to someone who wants to make a minimal amount of new email addresses, which one would you recommend over the other? 😅 Or maybe a third option?
People got flack for saying Proton is the CIA, Proton is NSA, Proton is a joint five-eyes country intelligence operation despite the convenient timing of their formation and lots of other things.
Maybe they’re not, maybe their CEO is just acting this way.
But consider for a moment if they were. IF they were then all of this would make more sense. The CIA/NSA/etc have a vested interest in discrediting and attacking Chinese technology they have no ability to spy or gather data through. The CIA/NSA could also for example see a point to throwing in publicly with Trump as part of a larger agreed upon push with the tech companies towards reactionary politics, towards what many call fascism or fascism-ish.
My mind is not made up. It’s kind of unknowable. I think they’re suspicious enough to be wary of trusting them but there’s no smoking gun, yet there wasn’t a smoking gun that CryptoAG was a CIA cut-out until some unauthorized leaks nearly a half century after they gained control and use of it. We know they have an interest in subverting encryption, in going fishing among “interesting” targets who might seek to use privacy-conscious services and among dissidents outside the west they may wish to vet and recruit.
True privacy advocates should not be throwing in with the agenda of any regime or bloc, especially those who so trample human and privacy rights as that of the US and co. They should be roundly suspicious of all power.
In other words, honeypot. And an US plant in Switzerland…
deleted by creator
Pretty rich coming from Proton, who shoved a LLM into their mail client mere months ago.
wait, what? How did I miss that? I use protonmail, and I didn’t see anything about an LLM in the mail client. Nor have I noticed it when I check my mail. Where/how do I find and disable that shit?
Thank you. I’ve saved the link and will be disabling it next time I log in. Can’t fucking escape this AI/LLM bullshit anywhere.
The combination of AI, crypto wallet and CEO’s pro-MAGA comments (all within six months or so!) are why I quit Proton. They’ve completely lost the plot. I just want a reliable email service and file storage.
Crypto and AI focus was a weird step before all this came out. But now we know Andy is pro republican… completes a very unappealing picture. We should have a database tho, plenty of c level execs and investor groups do far worse and get no scrutiny simply because they don’t post about it on the internet.
I’m considering leaving proton too. The two things I really care about are simplelogin and the VPN with port forwarding. As far as I understand it, proton is about the last VPN option you can trust with port forwarding
Happily using AirVPN for port forwarding.
I’m strongly considering switching to them! How do you like it?
As far as I understand it, proton is about the last VPN option you can trust with port forwarding
Could you explain this part please? What makes them untrustworthy?
I’m not 100% sure if you mean what do I think makes proton untrustworthy, or what do I think makes other vpns untrustworthy?
If you’re referring to proton, some of the statements Andy Yen have made recently are painting proton as less neutral than they claim to be.
I’m also generally aware that a LOT of vpn outfits are just a different company mining your traffic and data, and that there are few “no log” vpns that you can trust.
Despite their recent statements that sour my taste in giving proton money (and the ai bullshit that every goddam company is shoving down our throats), I trust proton when they say no logs. They’re regularly audited for it.
I don’t trust all these other VPN companies that claim to be no log and have nothing to back them up. Especially when several of them have been caught logging and mining/selling the data they claim to not be logging.
Once all that crap came out, I felt incredibly justified by never having switched to Proton.
It was entirely out of laziness, but still
How apt, just yesterday I put together an evidenced summary of the CEOs recent absurd comments. Why are Proton so keen to throw away so much good will people had invested in them?!
This is what the CEO posting as u/Proton_Team stated in a response on r/ProtonMail:
Here is our official response, also available on the Mastodon post in the screenshot:
Corporate capture of Dems is real. In 2022, we campaigned extensively in the US for anti-trust legislation.
Two bills were ready, with bipartisan support. Chuck Schumer (who coincidently has two daughters working as big tech lobbyists) refused to bring the bills for a vote.
At a 2024 event covering antitrust remedies, out of all the invited senators, just a single one showed up - JD Vance.
By working on the front lines of many policy issues, we have seen the shift between Dems and Republicans over the past decade first hand.
Dems had a choice between the progressive wing (Bernie Sanders, etc), versus corporate Dems, but in the end money won and constituents lost.
Until corporate Dems are thrown out, the reality is that Republicans remain more likely to tackle Big Tech abuses.
Source: https://archive.ph/quYyb
To call out the important bits:
- He refers to it as the “official response”
- Indicates that JD Vance is on their side just because he attended an event that other invited senators didn’t
- Rattles on about “corporate Dems” with incredible bias
- States “Republicans remain more likely to tackle Big Tech abuses” which is immediately refuted by every response
That was posted in ther/ProtonMail sub where the majority of the event took place: https://old.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1i1zjgn/so_that_happened/m7ahrlm/
However be aware that the CEO posting as u/Proton_Team kept editing his comments so I wouldn’t trust the current state of it. Plus the proton team/subreddit mods deleted a ton of discussion they didn’t like. Therefore this archive link captured the day after might show more but not all: https://web.archive.org/web/20250116060727/https://old.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1i1zjgn/so_that_happened/m7ahrlm/
Some statements were made on Mastodon but these are subsequently deleted, but they’re capture by an archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20250115165213/https://mastodon.social/@protonprivacy/113833073219145503
I learned about it from an r/privacy thread but true to their reputation the mods there also went on a deletion spree and removed the entire post: https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1i210jg/protonmail_supporting_the_party_that_killed/
This archive link might show more but I’ve not checked: https://web.archive.org/web/20250115193443/https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1i210jg/protonmail_supporting_the_party_that_killed/
There’s also this lemmy discussion from the day after but by that point the Proton team had fully kicked in their censorship so I don’t know how much people were aware of (apologies I don’t know how to make a generic lemmy link) https://feddit.uk/post/22741653
Until corporate Dems are thrown out, the reality is that Republicans remain more likely to tackle Big Tech abuses.
What a fucking dumbass. Yes, dems suck. But at least Lina Khan was head of the FTC and starting to change how antitrust laws are enforced. Did he delete this post after Trump was inaugurated with 3 of the richest tech billionaires?
Lisa Khan is a hero. This is quite twisted “logic”: this party sucks, so let’s side with Hitler instead.
How is this Open Source? The official repository https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1 contains images only, a PDF file, and links to download the model. I don’t see any code. What exactly is Open Source here? And if so, where to get the source code?
Open-Source in AI usually posted to HuggingFace instead of GitHub: https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1
In deep learning generally open source doesn’t include actual training or inference code. Rather it means they publish the model weights and parameters (necessary to run it locally/on your own hardware) and publish academic papers explaining how the model was trained. I’m sure Stallman disagrees but from the standpoint of deep learning research DeepSeek definitely qualifies as an “open source model”
Just because they call it Open Source does not make it. DeepSeek is not Open Source, it only provides model weights and parameters, not any source code and training data. I still don’t know whats in the model and we only get “binary” data, not any source code. This is not Libre software.
There is a nice (even if by now already a bit outdated) analysis about the openness of different “open source” generative AI projects in the following article: Liesenfeld, Andreas, and Mark Dingemanse. “Rethinking open source generative AI: open washing and the EU AI Act.” The 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. 2024.
So “Open Source” to AI is just releasing a .psd file used to export a jpeg, and you need some other proprietary software like Photoshop in order to use it.
What other proprietary software is necessary to use model weights?
OpenAI, Google, and Meta, for example, can push back against most excessive government demands.
Sure they “can” but do they?
They cannot. When big daddy FBI knocks on the door and you get that forced NDA you, will build in backdoors and comply with anything the US government tells you.
Even then the US might want to you to shut down because they want to control your company.
TikTok.
“Pushing back against the government” doesn’t even make sense. These people are oligarchs. They largely are the government. Who attended Trump’s inauguration? Who hosted Trump’s inauguration party? These US tech oligarchs.
Why do that when you can just score a deal with the government to give them whatever information they want for sweet perks like foreign competitors getting banned?
It’s simple:
bad.CHYNA
Well you just made me choke on my laughter. Well done, well done.
🤣
To be fair its correct but it’s poor writing to skip the self hosted component. These articles target the company not the model.
im not an expert at criticism, but I think its fair from their part.
I mean, can you remind me what are the hardware requirements to run deepseek locally?
oh, you need a high-end graphics card with at least 8 GB VRAM for that*? for the highly distilled variants! for more complete ones you need multiple such graphics card interconnected! how do you even do that with more than 2 cards on a consumer motherboard??how many do you think have access to such a system, I mean even 1 high-end gpu with just 8 GB VRAM, considering that more and more people only have a smartphone nowadays, but also that these are very expensive even for gamers?
and as you will read in the 2nd referenced article below, memory size is not the only factor: the distill requiring only 1 GB VRAM still requires a high-end gpu for the model to be usable.so my point is that when talking about deepseek, you can’t ignore how they operate their online service, as most people will only be able to try that.
I understand that recently it’s very trendy, and cool to shit on Proton, but they have a very strong point here.
There are plenty of other online platforms where you can use the unmodified model without siphoning your data to China. The model itself is just an offline blob and doesn’t need to be modified to make a “more secure” and “privacy friendly” version like the article says it does, because the model is not tasked with collecting and sharing your data. The author doesn’t seem to be aware of that.
Just because the average consumer doesn’t have the hardware to use it in a private manner does not mean it’s not achievable. The article straight up pretends self hosting doesn’t exist.
The 1.5B version that can be run basically on anything. My friend runs it in his shitty laptop with 512MB iGPU and 8GB of RAM (inference takes 30 seconds)
You don’t even need a GPU with good VRAM, as you can offload it to RAM (slower inference, though)
I’ve run the 14B version on my AMD 6700XT GPU and it only takes ~9GB of VRAM (inference over 1k tokens takes 20 seconds). The 8B version takes around 5-6GB of VRAM (inference over 1k tokens takes 5 seconds)
The numbers in your second link are waaaaaay off.
There are many llms you can use offline
Including DeepSeek: https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai
Deepseek works reasonably well, even at cpu only in ollama. I ran the 7b and 1.5b models and it wasn’t awful. 7b slowed down as the convo went on, but the 1.5b model felt pretty passable while I was playing with it
Proton have been too noisy from the very start .
