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.
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.
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.
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.
They very much do not believe that open source means safe or private. They have a tons of articles talking about the hurdles they have gone through to try and ensure they are, and where and when they have failed to do so.
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.
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.
It’s been noted that the apps by the company do send each and every keystroke back to china, though.
Who’s to say how poisoned the data in reality is.
Then by default it should never be considered safe. Honestly, this “open” release… it makes me wonder about ulterior motives.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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?
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
DeepSeek is opensource (unlike ClosedAI)
I eee this everywhere. They published the weights. That doesn’t make it open source
The article goes into great detail about how it’s different from OpenAI so, no.
Glad I steered clear of Proton, change my mind. No wait, don’t.
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?
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.
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.
whoosh
You might want to direct that elsewhere
You might not want to post apologia for a company defending a fascist party once, then doubling down, then trying to take it all back saying “it was a mistake to get political”
You might not want to post apologia for a company defending a fascist party once, then doubling down, then trying to take it all back saying “it was a mistake to get political”
At no point did I state “it was a mistake to get political” that is a narrative entirely from your own imagination.
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I made a sarcastic response to the opening comment. People didn’t notice the sarcasm. No worries my sense of humour isn’t overly obvious and I refuse to litter \s marks everywhere so I’m not too bothered if my comments are misinterpreted at times.
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the opening commenter responds sarcastically.
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I respond with another comment that’s absolutely dripping with sarcasm and even explicitly call out Proton’s bullshit. Somehow people still don’t note the sarcasm and yet they understood the firadin’s comment was sarcastic, odd but again I’m not too bothered.
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Somebody implies I haven’t understood a joke.
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I try to delicately suggest I’ve been misunderstood. Again, I’m not too bothered.
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Your response. Absolutely absurd.
At no point did I even defend the Nazis, at no point did I say or imply what you’re quoting me as saying.
The most ridiculous thing is you accuse me of “apologia” on the same day I repeatedly call out the inappropriateness of Proton’s stance because I got tired of reading so much “apologia”:
- https://feddit.uk/post/23492265/14925017
- https://feddit.uk/post/23516872/14924608
- https://feddit.uk/post/23513622/14924488
- https://feddit.uk/post/23386970/14887637
- https://feddit.uk/post/23386970/14883214
The solace I do take from this is that at least people are aware of the insanity of the hill Proton have decided to die on.
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Except you can’t run it.
Every model You are downloading and running is simply just a checkpoint of llama…
Quit spreading that misinformation.
You, and the grand majority of everyone else, doesn’t have anywhere near the hardware to run the actual full deepseek model
I run one a of the smaller model on an M1 max and it’s working pretty good. Much better than I would jave thought. Some guys on youtube manage to get the 600b parameters models to run on sub 5k hardware. It’s a total game changer. In a couple of years it will probably run loccaly on phones.
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.
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I don’t see how what they wrote is controversial, unless you’re a tankie.
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.
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.
Just because you can (pretty easily) self host it doesn’t mean that the privacy concerns aren’t valid.
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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