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.
I hate AI but on the other hand I love how Deepseek is causing AI companies to lose billions.
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.
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.
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.
Then by default it should never be considered safe. Honestly, this “open” release… it makes me wonder about ulterior motives.
A few of my friends who are a lot more knowledgeable about LLMs than myself are having a good look over the next week or so. It’ll take some time, but I’m sure they will post their results when they are done (pretty busy times unfortunately).
I’ll do my best to remember to come back here with a link or something when I have more info 😊
That said, hopefully someone else is also taking a look and we can get a few different perspectives.
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).
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.
They explicitly said the Republicans were on the side of the little guy. I probably don’t need to explain the awful shit that they’re doing that showcases that that is not what they’re doing.
Saying they’re “fighting for the little guys” while at the same time shitting on their political opponent is a clear show of support.
Now I don’t particularly care about the Proton CEO’s opinions. My opinion of CEOs is that they’re dickheads until proven otherwise. But when you publicly support this shit, and use your company’s official accounts to back yourself up, it becomes a lot more egregious in my mind. And even worse when they pretend they’re not actually doing that.
But his ‘support’ of the republicans was saying that 10 years ago they used to be against big tech and that he hoped Trump would vary that forward. Obviously Trump is very unlikely to do this but he is literally just hoping the republicans would do something about big tech that the dema didn’t do
Proton working overtime to discourage me from renewing.
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!
Exactly.
Also, none of the article applies if you run the model yourself, since the main risk is whatever the host does with your data. The model itself has no logic.
I would never use a hosted AI service, but I would probably use a self hosted one. We are trying a few models out at work and we’re hosting it ourselves.
True, hosting deepseek yourself is much better. I’d still wait and see if anyone finds weird stuff in the code itself but tbh idk how long that could take.
Can’t wait for the models to get better and hopefully stay open source!
weird stuff in the code
What code? We use a different runner for the model so we can run multiple different AI models, so the only thing we’re getting from DeepSeek is the model.
A quote from the article:
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.
This is just plain wrong. The model doesn’t contain the privacy unfriendly logic and can be used freely and unmodified. In fact, there are plenty of other platforms available right now where you can use it that are not Chinese.
This article makes fair points, if you ignore the fact that they don’t know what they’re talking about. You need to fix the errors in your head while reading it for it to make sense. If you don’t have the knowledge to do that, the whole article is a bit misleading.
