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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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.
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
Glad I steered clear of Proton, change my mind. No wait, don’t.
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.
Yeah, the same goes for global warming “if I burn these tires nothing happens, like its not any warmer here”, and then everyone does that and everyone loses on that.
I’m not sure I get the analogy? Like what’s the global warming here?
Let me give you a quick example. Let’s say that an LLM has pretty compelling evidence you’re committing crimes based on what you’ve told it. Literally the worst case scenario thing DeepSeek could do is give that data to domestic law enforcement, which is something OpenAI is already doing.
Oh so you are more like “If I kill a man and run away to Russia, that means Russia is the good guy here, because I won’t take any consequences”, I think this topic is pretty undefined here, like many people may have different opinion on that, wheter a company should cooperate with government. But the thing is Deepseek has to coop, they have no option, and Deepseek is on the enemy side for us - west, thats why giving them data is like giving them money, data is money, you want China to get bigger, or your country? If you localhost, yeah it is far more better than any ClosedAI, but people don’t do that, therefore you should be against using deepseek app and website if you care about interesr of your country.
I’m gonna split this up because it’ll be a long reply, but I’m gonna reply to each part of your comment:
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If I kill a man and run away to Russia, that means Russia is the good guy here, because I won’t take any consequences Murder is an easy example here. It’s silly to compare valuing privacy from your government to homicide. Here’s an example I’d use; given the current administrations recent anti-trans actions, let’s say the federal government requests a list from OpenAI of all users who had talked to ChatGPT about feelings of gender dysmorphia so they can be put on a blacklist for federal employment, or fire them if they’re closeted trans workers. And that could get a whole lot uglier than hiring/firing practices.
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many people may have different opinion on that, wheter a company should cooperate with governmen Not only does OpenAI reserve the right to work with law enforcement, OpenAI has plenty of lucrative federal contracts they wouldn’t risk jeopardizing by being difficult with data requests. And that’s all besides the fact the current CEO has expressed that he’s totally open to working with the current administration.
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But the thing is Deepseek has to coop I really don’t care if DeepSeek has to cooperate with the Chinese authorities. You still haven’t given a concrete reason how that actually presents any kind of tangible risk to me.
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Deepseek is on the enemy side for us - west Enemy how? We’re not at war. I have nothing against China or its citizens. I have absolutely no stake in whatever conflict you’re talking about.
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you want China to get bigger, or your country Again, I truly don’t care. I can’t think of any reason I should care other than pure nationalism.
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you should be against using deepseek app and website if you care about interesr of your country. Okay, which do you think is the more likely scenario here:
A. China declares war on the US and somehow manages to defeat the single largest military in the world, plus all of it’s allies, because they got some basic user data.
B. Domestic law enforcement / Federal US Government uses available data to target political dissidents and other “undesirables” (a tactic they’ve used on political activists in the past)
There’s no reason to worry more about the potential surveillance of a country literally on the other side of the planet when your own country that actually has jurisdiction over you has access to that same data and far more methods to target you.
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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.
Ah my mistake, they didn’t praise the fascist - just the fascist party. Big difference.
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.
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.
You could write this exact article about openai too
The thing is, some people like proton. Or liked, if this keeps going. When you build a business on trust and you start flailing like a headless chicken, people gets wary.
A blog post telling people to be wary of a Chinese app running an LLM people know very little about is flailing?
Can’t it be run standalone without network?
They also published the weights so we know more about it than some of the others
This focuses mostly on the app though, which is #1 on the app stores atm
We know it’s censored to comply with Chinese authorities, just not how much. It’s probably trained on some fairly heavy propaganda.
You don’t think ChatGPT reflects western propaganda?
As someone living in the west I prefer propaganda that isn’t trying to bring down the place where I live.
Personally, I think the West is doing fine job tearing itself apart right now
