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submitted 5 months ago by JOMusic@lemmy.ml to c/technology@lemmy.world

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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[-] cupcakezealot 142 points 5 months ago

I hate AI but on the other hand I love how Deepseek is causing AI companies to lose billions.

[-] Rogue@feddit.uk 76 points 5 months ago

The desperate PR campaign against deepseek is also very entertaining.

[-] heavydust@sh.itjust.works 14 points 5 months ago

Billionaires are really pissed about it, I’m happy.

[-] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 12 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

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.

[-] Rogue@feddit.uk 14 points 5 months ago

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.

[-] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 6 points 5 months ago

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.

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[-] tonytins@pawb.social 74 points 5 months ago

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.

[-] AstralPath@lemmy.ca 33 points 5 months ago

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.

[-] Fubarberry@sopuli.xyz 43 points 5 months ago

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.

[-] L_Acacia@lemmy.ml 12 points 5 months ago

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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[-] AstralPath@lemmy.ca 7 points 5 months ago

Then by default it should never be considered safe. Honestly, this "open" release... it makes me wonder about ulterior motives.

[-] rumba@lemmy.zip 20 points 5 months ago

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.

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[-] tabular@lemmy.world 6 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

If I obfuscate my code such that it's very difficult to understand then in practice it's like proprietary software, even with an open source license.

Correct me if I'm wrong but looking at the code isn't enough to understand what a neural network will do (if these "AI" are using that, maybe they're not).

[-] tonytins@pawb.social 17 points 5 months ago

Deepseek's R1 was built entirely on a multi-stage reinforcement learning process, and they pretty much open sourced that entire pipeline. By contrast, OpenAI has been giving us nothing but "look what we did" since GPT-3, and we're supposed to trust them.

[-] fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works 5 points 5 months ago

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.

[-] firadin@lemmy.world 60 points 5 months ago

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.

[-] Rogue@feddit.uk 13 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

For clarity the company did not explicitly support Trump. They simply stated negative things about the "corporate dems" and praised the new republican party.

[-] firadin@lemmy.world 49 points 5 months ago

Ah my mistake, they didn't praise the fascist - just the fascist party. Big difference.

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[-] MushuChupacabra@lemmy.world 39 points 5 months ago

Proton working overtime to discourage me from renewing.

[-] the_swagmaster@lemmy.zip 35 points 5 months ago

I don’t think they are that biased. They say in the article that ai models from all the leading companies are not private and shouldn’t be trusted with your data. The article is focusing on Deepseek given that’s the new big thing. Of course, since it’s controlled by China that makes data privacy even less of a thing that can be trusted.

Should we trust Deepseek? No. Should we trust OpenAI? No. Should we trust anything that is not developed by an open community? No.

I don’t think Proton is biased, they are explaining the risks with Deepseek specifically and mention how Ai’s aren’t much better. The article is not titled “Deepseek vs OpenAI” or anything like that. I don’t get why people bag on proton when they are the biggest privacy focused player that could (almost) replace google for most people!

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[-] crewman_princess@lemmy.sdf.org 26 points 5 months ago

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

[-] UnsavoryMollusk@lemmy.world 25 points 5 months ago

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.

[-] Deway@lemmy.world 15 points 5 months ago

But that's also true for American companies.

As a European, I trust them as much as I trust Chinese ones.

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[-] Bogasse@lemmy.ml 22 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

It would be fair if ChatGPT or any american service received the same treatment, but the only article I found from 2023 seems quite neutral :/

https://proton.me/blog/privacy-and-chatgpt

[-] Bogasse@lemmy.ml 13 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

We actually it seems quite fair-ish 🤷

AI has the potential to be a truly revolutionary development, one that could drive advancement for centuries. But it must be done correctly. These companies stand to make billions of dollars in revenue, and yet they violated our privacy and are training their tools using our data without our permission. Recent history shows we must act now if we’re to avoid an even worse version of surveillance capitalism.

Also from 2023 : https://proton.me/blog/ai-gdpr

[-] Evotech@lemmy.world 18 points 5 months ago

You could write this exact article about openai too

[-] cley_faye@lemmy.world 10 points 5 months ago

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.

[-] Evotech@lemmy.world 8 points 5 months ago

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

[-] Kbobabob@lemmy.world 6 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Can't it be run standalone without network?

They also published the weights so we know more about it than some of the others

[-] Evotech@lemmy.world 5 points 5 months ago

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.

[-] heavydust@sh.itjust.works 5 points 5 months ago

When the CEO praises Trump, says China bad because China while hiding that occidental AIs have the same kind of censorship, that’s hypocrisy.

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[-] FuzzyDog@lemmy.world 5 points 5 months ago

You don't think ChatGPT reflects western propaganda?

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[-] lemmus@szmer.info 15 points 5 months ago

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.

[-] FuzzyDog@lemmy.world 5 points 5 months ago

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.

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[-] Ulrich@feddit.org 15 points 5 months ago

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

That's not why. Almost no one is going to do that. That's why they didn't mention it.

[-] deegeese@sopuli.xyz 10 points 5 months ago

Anyone promoting LLMs without a big side of skepticism is exposing their bias.

[-] Hominine@lemmy.world 9 points 5 months ago

Glad I steered clear of Proton, change my mind. No wait, don't.

[-] Vinstaal0@lemmy.world 9 points 5 months ago

Just because you can (pretty easily) self host it doesn’t mean that the privacy concerns aren’t valid.

[-] febra@lemmy.world 7 points 5 months ago

Tutamail is a great email provider that takes security very seriously. Switched a few days ago and I'm very happy.

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[-] cy_narrator@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 5 months ago

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

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this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2025
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