Proton's very biased article on Deepseek

[email protected]

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.

[email protected]

Seems reasonable to think part of the motivation is disrupting American tech like openAI

[email protected]

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.

[email protected]

What are the minimum system requirements to run something like deepseek on your own computer in some kind of firewall container?

[email protected]

Is the chatbot interface that uses the model open source? If you self-host will it try to send data home?

[email protected]

Yes. The entire thing is open source. That's the thing and why you're here asking questions.

[email protected]

That's cool, I hope someone writes an article about how it works

[email protected]

It's Open Source. Don't need an article.

[email protected]

No I mean for someone to read the source and explain what they found or didn't find

[email protected]

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 ollama which supports https://ollama.com/library/deepseek-r1

So, assuming you have a relatively entry level computer you can install ollama then ollama run deepseek-r1:1.5b and try.

[email protected]

FWIW I did just try deepseek-r1:1.5b (the smallest model available via ollama today) 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.

[email protected]

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.

[email protected]

Why do they even have to give their goddamn opinion? Who asked? Why should they car

[email protected]

Surely Proton's own AI is without any of these problems... https://proton.me/blog/proton-scribe-writing-assistant

[email protected]

You could write this exact article about openai too

[email protected]

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.

[email protected]

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.

[email protected]

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.

[email protected]

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.

[email protected]

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.

agnos.is Forums

Proton's very biased article on Deepseek