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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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.
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.
Exactly. If a company can be trusted to provide privacy respecting products, they’ll come with receipts to prove it. Likewise, if they claim something else respects or doesn’t respect privacy, I likewise expect receipts.
They did a pretty good job here, but the article only seems to apply to the publicly accessible service. If you download it and run it through your runner of choice, you’re good. A privacy minded individual would probably already not trust new hosted services.
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.
But that’s also true for American companies.
As a European, I trust them as much as I trust Chinese ones.
Ho yeah but they are definitely not ignoring that in the article. It’s just that they are talking mostly about the subject of the article which is: deepseek
The problem with any kind of journalism like this though is that it talks about the topic of the article, sure, but it doesn’t acknowledge the other relevant parties that have most of all the same concerns.
It’s a matter of framing for the situation. I’d rather read something that talks about both sides instead of just one.
Wait. Protons CEO is conservative?
He’s been kissing the ring on social media like the others IIRC
Damn I switched to proton last year and am NOT migrating again.
I thought it was based in the EU. Why does he care about the US at all?
I will let you decide : https://theintercept.com/2025/01/28/proton-mail-andy-yen-trump-republicans/
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?
DeepSeek is opensource (unlike ClosedAI)
I eee this everywhere. They published the weights. That doesn’t make it open source
Ok correction noted, It still makes DeepSeek look better
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.
When the CEO praises Trump, says China bad because China while hiding that occidental AIs have the same kind of censorship, that’s hypocrisy.
He did not praise trump though
hiding that occidental AIs have the same kind of censorship
This is the second sentence in the article:
AI chat apps like ChatGPT collect user data, filter responses, and make content moderation decisions that are not always transparent.
The entire rest of the article is about how they actually do not have the same kind of censorship. You should try reading the article before commenting on it.
But DeepSeek…does all that and more.
You don’t think ChatGPT reflects western propaganda?
Probably, but that’s not the new thing
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
Sure it might but the thing is it may still acknowledge that there are different opinions on some topics. Does reflect how whilst governments may have a narrative, people can say what they think. In China, that’s a different story…
The article goes into great detail about how it’s different from OpenAI so, no.
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
That will take a few weeks most likely.
That said, there’s no way to verify what happens once the data leaves your machine, and the client isn’t that interesting. I certainly won’t trust any ai hosted by a third party because of that reason.
Now this is something people can be mad at
Proton working overtime to discourage me from renewing.
Glad I steered clear of Proton, change my mind. No wait, don’t.
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.
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.
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).
You should try the comparison between the larger models and the distilled models yourself before you make judgment. I suspect you’re going to be surprised by the output.
All of the models are basically generating possible outcomes based on noise. So if you ask it the same model the same question five different times and five different sessions you’re going to get five different variations on an answer.
You will find that an x out of five score between models is not that significantly different.
For certain cases larger models are advantageous. If you need a model to return a substantial amount of content to you. If you’re asking it to write you a chapter story. Larger models will definitely give you better output and better variation.
But if you’re asking you to help you with a piece of code or explain some historical event to you, The average 14B model that will fit on any computer with a video card will give you a perfectly serviceable answer.
I have tried them, and to be honest I was not surprised. The hosted service was better at longer code snippets and in particular, I found that it was consistently better at producing valid chain of thought reasoning chains (I’ve found that a lot of simpler models, including the distills, tend to produce shallow reasoning chains, even when they get the answer to a question right).
I’m aware of how these models work; I work in this field and have been developing a benchmark for reasoning capabilities in LLMs. The distills are certainly still technically impressive and it’s nice that they exist, but the gap between them and the hosted version is unfortunately nontrivial.
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.
The same is also true of ChatGPT. On the surface the results are incredibly believable but when you dig into it or try to use some of the generated code it’s nonsense.
Oh it works and works well sure might need some tweaking or prompt changing but it is decent at code gen.
I certainly think it’s cool, but the further you stray from the beaten path, the more newly janky it gets. I’m sure there’s a good workflow here, it’ll just take some time to find it.
I’ve found AI quicker at getting information. Search on the net is garbage find old articles that no longer are relavent or having to shift through pages of unrelated shit till you find what you want.
Tutamail is a great email provider that takes security very seriously. Switched a few days ago and I’m very happy.
Yet not great from a privacy perspective. They don’t even allow third party email apps.
That’s because your inbox is completely encrypted. As far as I know, no client provides support for that.
Posteo supports PGP encryption with a PGP key you have when an email comes into your inbox, which then can be decrypted by your client. So it is doable.
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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Why do they even have to give their goddamn opinion? Who asked? Why should they car
Just because you can (pretty easily) self host it doesn’t mean that the privacy concerns aren’t valid.
