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this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2024
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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Not to downplay what proton mail is doing, but they're saying that you can run this locally with a 2 core, 4 thread CPU from 2017 (the i3 7100, which is a 7000 series processor), and a RTX 2060, a GPU that was never considered high end. Perhaps they changed the requirements while you weren't looking. Or Am I reading this wrong?
only one of the 8 computers I own (and I’m not being cheeky here and counting embedded or retro systems, just laptops and desktops) is physically capable of meeting the model’s minimum requirements, and that’s only if I install chromium on the Windows gaming VM my bigger GPU’s dedicated to and access protonmail from there. nothing else I do needs a GPU that big, professional or otherwise — that hardware exists for games and nothing else. compared with the integrated GPUs most people have, a 2060’s fucking massive.
do you see how these incredibly high system requirements (for a webmail client of all things), alongside them already treating the local model as strictly optional, can act as a funnel redirecting people towards the insecure cloud version of the feature? “this feature only works securely on one of the computers where you write mail, at best” feels like a dark pattern to me.
Unfortunately, "extremely expensive" and "high-end" aren't really synonyms, thanks to, y'know, bitcoin. Of course, I don't disagree with your argument that having to buy a GPU just to ensure your webmail does what it's advertised to do is, well, dumb.
What I don't know is what the LLM even is. Did they just tack on Llama to their webmail app and call it a day? Did they train a model? Was it trained on emails? If so, whose emails? What an advertisement that would be: "Use Protonmail to encrypt your emails so that companies like Protonmail can't use them to train an LLM."
David’s article has some details on what the LLM is. I don’t think it’s trained on emails, but that doesn’t make me feel much better.