this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2025
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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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[–] [email protected] 3 points 15 minutes ago

How is this Open Source? The official repository https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1 contains images only, a PDF file, and links to download the model. I don't see any code. What exactly is Open Source here? And if so, where to get the source code?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 hours ago

How apt, just yesterday I put together an evidenced summary of the CEOs recent absurd comments. Why are Proton so keen to throw away so much good will people had invested in them?!


This is what the CEO posting as u/Proton_Team stated in a response on r/ProtonMail:

Here is our official response, also available on the Mastodon post in the screenshot:

Corporate capture of Dems is real. In 2022, we campaigned extensively in the US for anti-trust legislation.

Two bills were ready, with bipartisan support. Chuck Schumer (who coincidently has two daughters working as big tech lobbyists) refused to bring the bills for a vote.

At a 2024 event covering antitrust remedies, out of all the invited senators, just a single one showed up - JD Vance.

By working on the front lines of many policy issues, we have seen the shift between Dems and Republicans over the past decade first hand.

Dems had a choice between the progressive wing (Bernie Sanders, etc), versus corporate Dems, but in the end money won and constituents lost.

Until corporate Dems are thrown out, the reality is that Republicans remain more likely to tackle Big Tech abuses.

Source: https://archive.ph/quYyb

To call out the important bits:

  1. He refers to it as the "official response"
  2. Indicates that JD Vance is on their side just because he attended an event that other invited senators didn't
  3. Rattles on about "corporate Dems" with incredible bias
  4. States "Republicans remain more likely to tackle Big Tech abuses" which is immediately refuted by every response

That was posted in ther/ProtonMail sub where the majority of the event took place: https://old.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1i1zjgn/so_that_happened/m7ahrlm/

However be aware that the CEO posting as u/Proton_Team kept editing his comments so I wouldn't trust the current state of it. Plus the proton team/subreddit mods deleted a ton of discussion they didn't like. Therefore this archive link captured the day after might show more but not all: https://web.archive.org/web/20250116060727/https://old.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1i1zjgn/so_that_happened/m7ahrlm/

Some statements were made on Mastodon but these are subsequently deleted, but they're capture by an archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20250115165213/https://mastodon.social/@protonprivacy/113833073219145503

I learned about it from an r/privacy thread but true to their reputation the mods there also went on a deletion spree and removed the entire post: https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1i210jg/protonmail_supporting_the_party_that_killed/

This archive link might show more but I've not checked: https://web.archive.org/web/20250115193443/https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1i210jg/protonmail_supporting_the_party_that_killed/

There's also this lemmy discussion from the day after but by that point the Proton team had fully kicked in their censorship so I don't know how much people were aware of (apologies I don't know how to make a generic lemmy link) https://feddit.uk/post/22741653

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 hour ago

OpenAI, Google, and Meta, for example, can push back against most excessive government demands.

Sure they "can" but do they?

[–] cygnus 64 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Pretty rich coming from Proton, who shoved a LLM into their mail client mere months ago.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

wait, what? How did I miss that? I use protonmail, and I didn't see anything about an LLM in the mail client. Nor have I noticed it when I check my mail. Where/how do I find and disable that shit?

[–] cygnus 23 points 4 hours ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 22 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Thank you. I've saved the link and will be disabling it next time I log in. Can't fucking escape this AI/LLM bullshit anywhere.

[–] cygnus 25 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

The combination of AI, crypto wallet and CEO's pro-MAGA comments (all within six months or so!) are why I quit Proton. They've completely lost the plot. I just want a reliable email service and file storage.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 hours ago

Once all that crap came out, I felt incredibly justified by never having switched to Proton.

It was entirely out of laziness, but still

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

I'm considering leaving proton too. The two things I really care about are simplelogin and the VPN with port forwarding. As far as I understand it, proton is about the last VPN option you can trust with port forwarding

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

As far as I understand it, proton is about the last VPN option you can trust with port forwarding

Could you explain this part please? What makes them untrustworthy?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 18 minutes ago

I'm not 100% sure if you mean what do I think makes proton untrustworthy, or what do I think makes other vpns untrustworthy?

If you're referring to proton, some of the statements Andy Yen have made recently are painting proton as less neutral than they claim to be.

I'm also generally aware that a LOT of vpn outfits are just a different company mining your traffic and data, and that there are few "no log" vpns that you can trust.

Despite their recent statements that sour my taste in giving proton money (and the ai bullshit that every goddam company is shoving down our throats), I trust proton when they say no logs. They're regularly audited for it.

I don't trust all these other VPN companies that claim to be no log and have nothing to back them up. Especially when several of them have been caught logging and mining/selling the data they claim to not be logging.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Happily using AirVPN for port forwarding.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

I'm strongly considering switching to them! How do you like it?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

The interface - GUI and website - is straight out of 2008 and documentation could be better, but otherwise it works just fine for torrenting and browsing. No complaints there.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 57 minutes ago (1 children)

Can you easily get config files to set up wireguard without having to use their app? Secondarily to that, how easy is their port forwarding setup?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 21 minutes ago

They have their own config generator and port forwarding is really easy to set up IMO. Both need to be logged in to see, though.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

This is so unnecessary too, given that virtually both major OS already offer this feature built in and a Linux user will probably run their own LLM. Or you can just download ChatGPT et all.

It feels like there is a crisis of logic in the tech world, with everyone shoving LLMs into everything with no regard as to whether it adds any real value or not.

[–] [email protected] 49 points 4 hours ago (9 children)

DeepSeek is open source, meaning you can modify code(new window) on your own app to create an independent — and more secure — version. This has led some to hope that a more privacy-friendly version of DeepSeek could be developed. 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.

Any model trained or operated on DeepSeek’s servers is still subject to Chinese data laws, meaning that the Chinese government can demand access at any time.

What???? Whoever wrote this sounds like he has 0 understanding of how it works. There is no "more privacy-friendly version" that could be developed, the models are already out and you can run the entire model 100% locally. That's as privacy-friendly as it gets.

"Any model trained or operated on DeepSeek's servers are still subject to Chinese data laws"

Operated, yes. Trained, no. The model is MIT licensed, China has nothing on you when you run it yourself. I expect better from a company whose whole business is on privacy.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

To be fair, most people can't actually self-host Deepseek, but there already are other providers offering API access to it.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

There are plenty of step-by-step guides to run Deepseek locally. Hell, someone even had it running on a Raspberry Pi. It seems to be much more efficient than other current alternatives.

That's about as openly available to self host as you can get without a 1-button installer.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

You can run an imitation of the DeepSeek R1 model, but not the actual one unless you literally buy a dozen of whatever NVIDIA’s top GPU is at the moment.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 hour ago

A server grade CPU with a lot of RAM and memory bandwidth would work reasonable well, and cost "only" ~$10k rather than 100k+...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (1 children)

Those are not deepseek R1. They are unrelated models like llama3 from Meta or Qwen from Alibaba "distilled" by deepseek.

This is a common method to smarten a smaller model from a larger one.

Ollama should have never labelled them deepseek:8B/32B. Way too many people misunderstood that.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 57 minutes ago

I'm running deepseek-r1:14b-qwen-distill-fp16 locally and it produces really good results I find. Like yeah it's a reduced version of the online one, but it's still far better than anything else I've tried running locally.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 hours ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 hours ago
[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 hours ago

Well you just made me choke on my laughter. Well done, well done.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 hours ago

To be fair its correct but it's poor writing to skip the self hosted component. These articles target the company not the model.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

There are many llms you can use offline

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago

Deepseek works reasonably well, even at cpu only in ollama. I ran the 7b and 1.5b models and it wasn't awful. 7b slowed down as the convo went on, but the 1.5b model felt pretty passable while I was playing with it

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 hours ago

Proton have been too noisy from the very start .

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 hours ago (3 children)

It might be that they're equating the name with the app and company, not the open source model, based on one of the first lines:

AI chat apps like ChatGPT collect user data, filter responses, and make content moderation decisions that are not always transparent.

Emphasis mine. The rest of the article reads the same way.

Most people aren't privacy-conscious enough to care who gets what data and who's building the binaries and web apps, so sounding the alarm is appropriate for people who barely know the difference between AI and AGI.

I get that people are mad at Proton right now (anyone have a link? I'm behind on the recent stuff), but we should ensure we get mad at things that are real, not invent imaginary ones based on contrived contexts.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 hours ago

Yeah it's a fair call, but to me it is the very context of why people are made at Proton that makes me suspicious of articles like this.

I can't find the original summary post someone made, but here's the last response from Proton CEO. Read the comments as well to get a good summary: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1i2nz9v/on_politics_and_proton_a_message_from_andy/

TL;DR: Proton used their official accounts to share CEO's pro-US-Republican thoughts as their official stance. They since apologized and said they would use personal account to share those thoughts. But (IMO) now having posted this blog on the actual Proton website, it says to me that there are some serious bias alignment issues with a company that is supposed to be a safe-haven away from all of that.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

Here is a general write up about the CEO showing their maga colors.

More happened in the reddit thread though that added some more elements, like the ceo opting for a new user name with "88" in it (a common right wing reference), his unprompted use of the phrase "didnt mean to trigger you," him evasively refusing to clarify what his stance actually was because "that would be more politics," on and on. You can read through that thread here, although proton corporate are mods, so i have no idea what they may have deleted at this point.

The thread was full of "mask on" behavior that is pretty transparent to anyone experienced with the alt right on the internet.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Thank you so much! That was way beyond what I could have hoped.

I'll read the link you provided in a bit, but that does sound really bad. Must suck to work at a company you think is helping people stay private only to have the CEO come out as pro-fascism.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

No problem mate. The thread is a mess, but if you read the comments below the top pinned one, you'll see most of the salient points that pissed people off. The "color" i mentioned above came from all over that thread, with some of it deleted. I know he edited/deleted the "triggered" comment when he was called out, but he never expanded on why he claimed the GOP was the "party of the little guy" and why all the "corporate dems needed to be thrown out" to get anything done. He also opted not to respond at all to people asking why he thought the party of tech billionaires was suddenly going to crack down on tech billionaires besides saying he really liked J.D Vance, a tech millionaire whose political run was funded by, get this, tech billionaire Peter theil.

Dude fawned very publicly over tech billionaire maga, who will do clearly do nothing for privacy and monopoly busting, while pretending that the real issue is chuck shumers and establishment dems.

The bias is clear and prominent.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

I wasn't a customer of theirs (I'm always skeptical of super-popular-anything), but I think I'll look elsewhere for secure email.

Not because of this article, which I think makes some decent points, but because I would worry in the back of my mind that the Officers of the company would happily bow to their demigods and start secretly tracking people as a show of fealty.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 hours ago

it is certainly that. but recently its become very trendy to hate Proton, so its just easier to do that instead of thinking. I'm really disappointed in this community

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (2 children)

im not an expert at criticism, but I think its fair from their part.

I mean, can you remind me what are the hardware requirements to run deepseek locally?
oh, you need a high-end graphics card with at least 8 GB VRAM for that*? for the highly distilled variants! for more complete ones you need multiple such graphics card interconnected! how do you even do that with more than 2 cards on a consumer motherboard??

how many do you think have access to such a system, I mean even 1 high-end gpu with just 8 GB VRAM, considering that more and more people only have a smartphone nowadays, but also that these are very expensive even for gamers?
and as you will read in the 2nd referenced article below, memory size is not the only factor: the distill requiring only 1 GB VRAM still requires a high-end gpu for the model to be usable.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/amd-released-instructions-for-running-deepseek-on-ryzen-ai-cpus-and-radeon-gpus

https://bizon-tech.com/blog/how-to-run-deepseek-r1-locally-a-free-alternative-to-openais-o1-model-hardware-requirements#a6

https://codingmall.com/knowledge-base/25-global/240733-what-are-the-system-requirements-for-running-deepseek-models-locally

so my point is that when talking about deepseek, you can't ignore how they operate their online service, as most people will only be able to try that.

I understand that recently it's very trendy, and cool to shit on Proton, but they have a very strong point here.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago

The 1.5B version that can be run basically on anything. My friend runs it in his shitty laptop with 512MB iGPU and 8GB of RAM (inference takes 30 seconds)

You don't even need a GPU with good VRAM, as you can offload it to RAM (slower inference, though)

I've run the 14B version on my AMD 6700XT GPU and it only takes ~9GB of VRAM (inference over 1k tokens takes 20 seconds). The 8B version takes around 5-6GB of VRAM (inference over 1k tokens takes 5 seconds)

The numbers in your second link are waaaaaay off.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 hours ago

Just because the average consumer doesn’t have the hardware to use it in a private manner does not mean it’s not achievable. The article straight up pretends self hosting doesn’t exist.

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