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.
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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.
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.
Which somebody who can be trusted wouldn’t ever do.
Businesses sell goods, services, deals, not truth.
And privacy is not about trust.
You could write this exact article about openai too
Surely Proton’s own AI is without any of these problems… https://proton.me/blog/proton-scribe-writing-assistant
Why do they even have to give their goddamn opinion? Who asked? Why should they car
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.
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.
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.
Saying they’re “fighting for the little guys” while at the same time shitting on their political opponent is a clear show of support, and a clear show of bias.
Ah my mistake, they didn’t praise the fascist - just the fascist party. Big difference.
Exactly it’s totally different.
And they never specifically praised the vice president they simply made some fucked up association that his attendance of an event meant he was on side contrary to pretty much every other indication that has ever been given.
whoosh
You might want to direct that elsewhere
You might not want to post apologia for a company defending a fascist party once, then doubling down, then trying to take it all back saying “it was a mistake to get political”
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!
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.
Then by default it should never be considered safe. Honestly, this “open” release… it makes me wonder about ulterior motives.
That’s not quite it either.
The model itself is just a giant ball of math. They made a thing that can transform an English through the collected knowledge of much of humanity a few dozen times and have it crap out a reasonable English answer.
The open source part is kind of a misnomer. They explained how they cooked the meal but not the ingredient list.
To complete the analogy, their astounding claim is that they managed to cook the meal with less fire than anyone else has by a factor of like 1000.
But the model itself is inherently safe. It’s not like it’s a binary that can carry a virus or do crazy crap. Even convincing it to do give planned nefarious answers is frankly beyond our capabilities so far.
The dangerous part that proton is looking at and honestly is a given for any hosted AI, is in the hosting server side of things. You make your requests to their servers and then their servers put the requests into the model and return you the output.
If you ask their web servers for information about tiananmen square they will block you.
You can, however, download the model yourself and run it yourself and there’s not any security issues there.
It will tell you anything that you need to know about tiananmen square.
What are the minimum system requirements to run something like deepseek on your own computer in some kind of firewall container?
There are plenty of ways and they are all safe. Don’t think of DeepSeek as anything more than a (extremely large, like bigger than a AAA) videogame. It does take resources, e.g disk space and RAM and GPU VRAM (if you have some) but you can use “just” the weights and thus the executable might come from another project, an open-source one that will not “phone home” (assuming that’s your worry).
I detail this kind of things and more in https://fabien.benetou.fr/Content/SelfHostingArtificialIntelligence but to be more pragmatic I’d recommend
ollamawhich supports https://ollama.com/library/deepseek-r1So, assuming you have a relatively entry level computer you can install
ollamathenollama run deepseek-r1:1.5band try.FWIW I did just try
deepseek-r1:1.5b(the smallest model available viaollamatoday) and … not bad at all for 1.1Gb!It’s still AI BS generating slop without “thinking” at all … but from the few tests I ran, it might be one of the “least worst” smaller model I tried.
Seems reasonable to think part of the motivation is disrupting American tech like openAI
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.
Proton working overtime to discourage me from renewing.
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
I don’t see how what they wrote is controversial, unless you’re a tankie.
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.
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.
Anyone promoting LLMs without a big side of skepticism is exposing their bias.
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.
Is the chatbot interface that uses the model open source? If you self-host will it try to send data home?
Yes. The entire thing is open source. That’s the thing and why you’re here asking questions.
That’s cool, I hope someone writes an article about how it works
It’s Open Source. Don’t need an article.
No I mean for someone to read the source and explain what they found or didn’t find
Glad I steered clear of Proton, change my mind. No wait, don’t.
