Proton's very biased article on Deepseek

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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.

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

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

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You could write this exact article about openai too

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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A blog post telling people to be wary of a Chinese app running an LLM people know very little about is flailing?

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It is open-weight, we dont have access to the training code nor the dataset.

That being said it should be safe for your computer to run Deepseeks models since the weight are .safetensors which should block any code execution from injected code in the models weight.

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A few of my friends who are a lot more knowledgeable about LLMs than myself are having a good look over the next week or so. It'll take some time, but I'm sure they will post their results when they are done (pretty busy times unfortunately).

I'll do my best to remember to come back here with a link or something when I have more info

That said, hopefully someone else is also taking a look and we can get a few different perspectives.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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We're running it at work on a Mac mini with 64GB RAM (48GB for the GPU), and while it's a little slow, it works fine.

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Exactly.

Also, none of the article applies if you run the model yourself, since the main risk is whatever the host does with your data. The model itself has no logic.

I would never use a hosted AI service, but I would probably use a self hosted one. We are trying a few models out at work and we're hosting it ourselves.

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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.

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Now this is something people can be mad at

agnos.is Forums

Proton's very biased article on Deepseek