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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
Open-Source in AI usually posted to HuggingFace instead of GitHub: https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1
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?
Jesus fuckin Christ, just marry Trump at this point, Mister proton CEO.
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
To be fair its correct but it’s poor writing to skip the self hosted component. These articles target the company not the model.
I want to preface this question by saying that I’m not trolling and I’m not defending Proton. I’m genuinely confused at the reaction to this article.
I’m also upset with Proton’s recent comments, specifically the December tweet and subsequent responses, and I’m evaluating my use of Proton.
Near as I can tell, this article (which I did read) lays out the facts about Deepseek as an LLM originating in China and the implications of that.
Why is this article a reason to pile on proton?
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.
The reason a very small subset of users love it*
All the downloads making it the top app in the app stores are from people using their centralized service. The people behind these downloads have no clue that you can run it locally or can even start to understand what that would even mean. It is this usage the article is addressing.
Like the thread starter, I am also confused to why this in particular draws so much hate.
Proton had a reputation for being the good guy. In the span of a month, we saw them bend the knee, flip flop and throw shade at competition; all while pretending to be the hero. We essentially have to trust them with our data and they are showing signs that they are willing to act against that trust with worrisome agendas and biases. It’s not a good look, and since this marketing to users key issues, it’s going to cause some responses.
this is obviously talking about their web app, which most people will be using. In this special instance, it was clearly not the LLM itself censoring the Tiananmen Square, but a layer on top.
i have not bothered downloading and asking deepseek about Tiananmen Square. so i cannot know what the model would have generated. however, it is possible that certain biasses are trained into any model.
i am pretty sure, this blog is aimed at the average user. while i wouldn’t trust any LLM company with my data, i certainly wouldn’t want the chinese government to have them. anyone that knows how to use (ollama)[https://github.com/ollama/ollama] should know these telemetry data don’t apply to running locally. but for sure, pointing it out in the blog would help.
@ToxicWaste @JOMusic the censorship is trained into the ollama models too. But of course the self-hosted model cannot send anything to China, so at least the whole tracking issue is avoided.
Goddammit I had such high hopes for Proton. Was planning on that being my post-Google main. Now what. 💀
I’ve been happy with Fastmail for 10 years, though they’re Australian and not European. Might look into a European alternative at some point but so far I’ve had no reason to switch.
I’ve heard of Startmail being an alternative, it’s based in the Netherlands but it’s quite expensive ($7/month) and it’s owned by an adtech company (System1)
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…
Tutanota is gdpr but only 1GB free storage. They do offer calendar for free as well with open sourced apps.
Thanks! I saw Tuta from the previous comment and thought 1 GB is a bit on the small side, kind of like Proton. But not too expensive to go up a tier either. 👍
I use Infomaniak Mail or ikmail for short. They give you 20GB free, have a whole suite (calendar and others), and are Swiss based. It can also link to other mail clients under the free tier. Only hurdle is using a VPN or proxy for initial sign up, but that can be turned off for daily usage.
I found this while searching on my own. Might help someone else. 🤷♂️
honestly probably worth paying for for something if it means enough to you
At this point I’m this 🤏 close to
hosting my own emailabandoning it all and living in a cabin in yhe woodsMan, I wish self hosted email was a reasonable thing to do. But it’s a pain to set up the server and the domain stuff, and once you do, if anyone ever spammed off that IP, you’re probably screwed anyway because good luck getting off the blacklists.
It’s simple:
bad.Well you just made me choke on my laughter. Well done, well done.
CHYNA
🤣
It might be that they’re equating the name with the app and company, not the open source model, based on one of the first lines:
AI chat apps like ChatGPT collect user data, filter responses, and make content moderation decisions that are not always transparent.
Emphasis mine. The rest of the article reads the same way.
Most people aren’t privacy-conscious enough to care who gets what data and who’s building the binaries and web apps, so sounding the alarm is appropriate for people who barely know the difference between AI and AGI.
I get that people are mad at Proton right now (anyone have a link? I’m behind on the recent stuff), but we should ensure we get mad at things that are real, not invent imaginary ones based on contrived contexts.
Yeah it’s a fair call, but to me it is the very context of why people are made at Proton that makes me suspicious of articles like this.
I can’t find the original summary post someone made, but here’s the last response from Proton CEO. Read the comments as well to get a good summary: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1i2nz9v/on_politics_and_proton_a_message_from_andy/
TL;DR: Proton used their official accounts to share CEO’s pro-US-Republican thoughts as their official stance. They since apologized and said they would use personal account to share those thoughts. But (IMO) now having posted this blog on the actual Proton website, it says to me that there are some serious bias alignment issues with a company that is supposed to be a safe-haven away from all of that.
it is certainly that. but recently its become very trendy to hate Proton, so its just easier to do that instead of thinking. I’m really disappointed in this community
Most people aren’t privacy-conscious enough to care who gets what data
I assume most people who pay for proton don’t fall into this category
Perhaps, and if they do indeed care and read that blog, maybe they’ll share it with friends who don’t have a clue.
Here is a general write up about the CEO showing their maga colors.
More happened in the reddit thread though that added some more elements, like the ceo opting for a new user name with “88” in it (a common right wing reference), his unprompted use of the phrase “didnt mean to trigger you,” him evasively refusing to clarify what his stance actually was because “that would be more politics,” on and on. You can read through that thread here, although proton corporate are mods, so i have no idea what they may have deleted at this point.
The thread was full of “mask on” behavior that is pretty transparent to anyone experienced with the alt right on the internet.
Thank you so much! That was way beyond what I could have hoped.
I’ll read the link you provided in a bit, but that does sound really bad. Must suck to work at a company you think is helping people stay private only to have the CEO come out as pro-fascism.
No problem mate. The thread is a mess, but if you read the comments below the top pinned one, you’ll see most of the salient points that pissed people off. The “color” i mentioned above came from all over that thread, with some of it deleted. I know he edited/deleted the “triggered” comment when he was called out, but he never expanded on why he claimed the GOP was the “party of the little guy” and why all the “corporate dems needed to be thrown out” to get anything done. He also opted not to respond at all to people asking why he thought the party of tech billionaires was suddenly going to crack down on tech billionaires besides saying he really liked J.D Vance, a tech millionaire whose political run was funded by, get this, tech billionaire Peter theil.
Dude fawned very publicly over tech billionaire maga, who will do clearly do nothing for privacy and monopoly busting, while pretending that the real issue is chuck shumers and establishment dems.
The bias is clear and prominent.
I wasn’t a customer of theirs (I’m always skeptical of super-popular-anything), but I think I’ll look elsewhere for secure email.
Not because of this article, which I think makes some decent points, but because I would worry in the back of my mind that the Officers of the company would happily bow to their demigods and start secretly tracking people as a show of fealty.
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
Indicates that JD Vance is on their side just because he attended an event that other invited senators didn’t
🤣
Show up at an event = my best friend and definitely not a leopard ready to eat my face ???
🤔
(What a dumbass)
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?
Did he delete this post after Trump was inaugurated with 3 of the richest tech billionaires?
The nominees were announced long before trump was inaugurated.
Lisa Khan is a hero. This is quite twisted “logic”: this party sucks, so let’s side with Hitler instead.
Proton have been too noisy from the very start .
1978 US Automotive Companies: If we make a product that locks our customers in, they’ll be our customers forever!
1978 Japanese Automotive Companies: The US gave us their required parameters. If we make a product that works then customers will keep buying our stuff.
2025 US Tech Companies: If we make our products contingent on proprietary software and hardware, we’ll lock them in.
2025 Chinese Tech Companies: The US gave us their required parameters. If we make a product that works and they can utilize freely, they’ll keep buying our stuff.
Not our first rodeo.
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”
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
we are democratic, they are communism, and we cannot just give them our data for free,
You got a lot to learn but this statement gave me serious loolz
Is China in the room with you right now?
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.
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.
Off topic:
Don’t get a Chinese Android phone tho. Because you’ll have both CCP AND NSA Spyware.
Best bet is Pixel + Graphene OS since LGBTQ+ people are gonna get targeted.
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.
“I don’t care if rus or china”… Guys you really don’t think. If you lived in Ukraine, would you care about giving russians address where you live? Then why you don’t care giving them your data, when you live on the west? Because we are not physically fighting rus/china doesn’t mean we are not on the war with them. I said it is great Deepseek is possible to host locally, but no one cares, everyone use their app anyway, and this is the problem, as it is even worse than using ClosedAI.
I want Russia to win (and it will) and I want China to win (and it will). My use of an LLM isn’t going to make one lick of difference one way or the other, but if it did, I would help it in any and every conceivable way.
You are a fucking nerd for thinking you have more “privacy” to lose to China than to the profiteering, rent-seeking silicon valley bastards who are already and right now exploiting the fuck outta you.
I’d better be a “fucking nerd” that invented all that shit that you use now, than a fucking idiot who doesn’t ever use brain and probably lives in a fucking america. But I like how so many kids think communism is good, when they live in a democratic freedom country. Read some books, use this technology for something else instead bullshit, as you don’t know the world yet.
