For me the issue here is, why put so much time and energy into basically rebranding an LLM. I've seen LLMs running on RPi and android phones. Why not write a blog post showing how to run LLMs locally with existing tools for the best privacy instead and put more focus on their existing services. It just seems like they're jumping on the AI bandwagon and charging a premium for an already freely available LLM.

I see some benefits of AI like quality tts when using OSM and stt when transcribing/translating audio but other things like Googles AI answers and Microsofts Copilot leave me scratching my head wondering why consumer would want this

I think that the point is it's entirely pointless building something like this into the email system. It should be a separate system that you can choose to use if you want it. Building it in just opens questions about exactly what they're doing with your data, despite their assurances.

This is one of those situations. People would eat sweet food if they didn't know it's bad for them. In fact they still eat shitloads while they do know it's bad. Same goes for opiates, and there's a reason why they are regulated in most of the world (the usa of course is fucked up with this). So yes, let's boil the fucking oceans so dumb fucks don't have to learn how to write a fucking email. Let's say people have to learn what kinds of shit are included with "ai", they have to learn how much it actually costs, what all of the nft cunts are now doing, and then say if they want something or not. I mean, this is all just fucking gaslighting by now, right? I don't care what a fucking ignorant shit thinks about mostly anything - but this is a shitty company telling us 'you want it so hard baby' so it can pump that ai investor hose SO HARD

Yeah this would be like Google saying Google Search was "open source" because map-reduce was open, or something.

LLM's are actually good at some things.

Just look at the most recent ecological reports about it and combine them with the AI industry growth plans. You'll get an interesting perspective.

They're really good at burning hug amounts of electricity.

this can run locally on your device which means probably doesn't consume that much energy

Kids these days don't learn cursive writing, it's destroying their literacy!

The term "model collapse" gets brought up frequently to describe this, but it's commonly very misunderstood. There actually isn't a fundamental problem with training an AI on data that includes other AI outputs, as long as the training data is well curated to maintain its quality. That needs to be done with non-AI-generated training data already anyway so it's not really extra effort. The research paper that popularized the term "model collapse" used an unrealistically simplistic approach, it just recycled all of an AI's output into the training set for subsequent generations of AI without any quality control or additional training data mixed in.

I might be naive, but given how often its being done I have to imagine that of all the project initiatives at Proton, adding LLMs is a relatively easy integration, when you compare it do developing a native application. Im sure theres been work at proton for a long time on those features, its just that the LLM team did this project quickly.

not really. You don't get to decide what the company does if you are a paying customer. I am a paying customer and I want this. If you don't like it you can just use your money elsewhere

An AI writing assistant was one of the most requested features in their community survey. Trying to construct an outrage narrative on behalf of the consumer doesn't really work when the consumer literally voted for this.

I do just want to point out that all the other paying customers also deserve the same say as you do, and in the survey linked multiple times in this thread this feature was the second-most requested feature of the Proton team by its users. It would be obtuse of the Proton team to ignore something a full third of its users want, no?