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.
Pretty rich coming from Proton, who shoved a LLM into their mail client mere months ago.
they were also caught praising a nazi party so thats that too
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?
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.
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.
Once all that crap came out, I felt incredibly justified by never having switched to Proton.
It was entirely out of laziness, but still
I know, I was on a big anti-google crusade and Proton seemed like an easy plug-n-play for a lot of the same services. That’s OK, I’m not really an “all your eggs in one basket” kind of person anyway.
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
Happily using AirVPN for port forwarding.
It’s simple:
bad.CHYNA
🤣
Well you just made me choke on my laughter. Well done, well done.
OpenAI, Google, and Meta, for example, can push back against most excessive government demands.
Sure they “can” but do they?
“Pushing back against the government” doesn’t even make sense. These people are oligarchs. They largely are the government. Who attended Trump’s inauguration? Who hosted Trump’s inauguration party? These US tech oligarchs.
Why do that when you can just score a deal with the government to give them whatever information they want for sweet perks like foreign competitors getting banned?
They cannot. When big daddy FBI knocks on the door and you get that forced NDA you, will build in backdoors and comply with anything the US government tells you.
Even then the US might want to you to shut down because they want to control your company.
TikTok.
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.
To be fair, most people can’t actually self-host Deepseek, but there already are other providers offering API access to it.
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.
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.
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.
The 1.5B/7B/8B/13B/32B/70B models are all officially DeepSeek R1 models, that is what DeepSeek themselves refer to those models as. It is DeepSeek themselves who produced those models and released them to the public and gave them their names. And their names are correct, it is just factually false to say they are not DeepSeek R1 models. They are.
The “R1” in the name means “reasoning version one” because it does not just spit out an answer but reasons through it with an internal monologue. For example, here is a simple query I asked DeepSeek R1 13B:
Me: can all the planets in the solar system fit between the earth and the moon?
DeepSeek: Yes, all eight planets could theoretically be lined up along the line connecting Earth and the Moon without overlapping. The combined length of their diameters (approximately 379,011 km) is slightly less than the average Earth-Moon distance (about 384,400 km), allowing them to fit if placed consecutively with no required spacing.
However, on top of its answer, I can expand an option to see its internal monologue it went through before generating the answer, which you can find the internal monologue here because it’s too long to paste.
What makes these consumer-oriented models different is that that rather than being trained on raw data, they are trained on synthetic data from pre-existing models. That’s what the “Qwen” or “Llama” parts mean in the name. The 7B model is trained on synthetic data produced by Qwen, so it is effectively a compressed version of Qen. However, neither Qwen nor Llama can “reason,” they do not have an internal monologue.
This is why it is just incorrect to claim that something like DeepSeek R1 7B Qwen Distill has no relevance to DeepSeek R1 but is just a Qwen model. If it’s supposedly a Qwen model, why is it that it can do something that Qwen cannot do but only DeepSeek R1 can? It’s because, again, it is a DeepSeek R1 model, they add the R1 reasoning to it during the distillation process as part of its training. They basically use synthetic data generated from DeepSeek R1 to fine-tune readjust its parameters so it adopts a similar reasoning style. It is objectively a new model because it performs better on reasoning tasks than just a normal Qwen model. It cannot be considered solely a Qwen model nor an R1 model because its parameters contain information from both.
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.
Its so cute when chinese is sprinkled in randomly hehe my little bilingual robot in my pc
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.
Unfortunately it is you who have 0 understanding of it. Read my comment below. Tldr: good luck to have the hardware
Down votes be damned, you are right to call out the parent they clearly dont articulate their point in a way that confirms they actually understand what is going on and how an open source model can still have privacy implications if the masses use the company’s hosted version.
There are already other providers like Deepinfra offering DeepSeek. So while the the average person (like me) couldn’t run it themselves, they do have alternative options.
which probably also collects and keeps everything you say in the chat. just look in ublock origin’s expanded view to see their approach to privacy, by having a look at all the shit they are pushing to your browser
I understand it well. It’s still relevant to mention that you can run the distilled models on consumer hardware if you really care about privacy. 8GB+ VRAM isn’t crazy, especially if you have a ton of unified memory on macbooks or some Windows laptops releasing this year that have 64+GB unified memory. There are also websites re-hosting various versions of Deepseek like Huggingface hosting the 32B model which is good enough for most people.
Instead, the article is written like there is literally no way to use Deepseek privately, which is literally wrong.
So I’ve been interested in running one locally but honestly I’m pretty confused what model I should be using. I have a laptop with a 3070 mobile in it. What model should I be going after?
as I said in my original comment, it’s not only VRAM that matters.
I honestly doubt that even gamer laptops can run these models with a usable speed, but even if we add up the people who have such a laptop, and those who have a PC powerful enough to run these models, they are tiny fractions of those that use the internet on the world. it is basically not available to those that want to use it. ot is available to some of them, but not nearly all who may want it
Obviously you need lots of GPUs to run large deep learning models. I don’t see how that’s a fault of the developers and researchers, it’s just a fact of this technology.
and that is not what I was complaining about
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:
- He refers to it as the “official response”
- Indicates that JD Vance is on their side just because he attended an event that other invited senators didn’t
- Rattles on about “corporate Dems” with incredible bias
- 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
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Until corporate Dems are thrown out, the reality is that Republicans remain more likely to tackle Big Tech abuses.
What a fucking dumbass. Yes, dems suck. But at least Lina Khan was head of the FTC and starting to change how antitrust laws are enforced. Did he delete this post after Trump was inaugurated with 3 of the richest tech billionaires?
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1978 US Automotive Companies: If we make a product that locks our customers in, they’ll be our customers forever!
1978 Japanese Automotive Companies: The US gave us their required parameters. If we make a product that works then customers will keep buying our stuff.
2025 US Tech Companies: If we make our products contingent on proprietary software and hardware, we’ll lock them in.
2025 Chinese Tech Companies: The US gave us their required parameters. If we make a product that works and they can utilize freely, they’ll keep buying our stuff.
Not our first rodeo.
I suspect the enshittification of proton is fast approaching.
Im stuck. Is there a Guide for a fast approaching full suit switch?
Caleneder, Passwords, Email, Drive?
@ReakDuck Well Nextcloud I guess but they only offer an email client so you can connect an existing email account
Goddammit I had such high hopes for Proton. Was planning on that being my post-Google main. Now what. 💀
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At this point I’m this 🤏 close to
hosting my own emailabandoning it all and living in a cabin in yhe woodsAnything European-based to recommend? I’d like something as far-removed from America as possible, respecting GDPR, privacy, etc., but with a good-sized free-tier storage. I don’t think I need more than a couple GB for email. Calendar included would be a big plus as well. 😅 Probably asking for a lot here…
honestly probably worth paying for for something if it means enough to you
People got flack for saying Proton is the CIA, Proton is NSA, Proton is a joint five-eyes country intelligence operation despite the convenient timing of their formation and lots of other things.
Maybe they’re not, maybe their CEO is just acting this way.
But consider for a moment if they were. IF they were then all of this would make more sense. The CIA/NSA/etc have a vested interest in discrediting and attacking Chinese technology they have no ability to spy or gather data through. The CIA/NSA could also for example see a point to throwing in publicly with Trump as part of a larger agreed upon push with the tech companies towards reactionary politics, towards what many call fascism or fascism-ish.
My mind is not made up. It’s kind of unknowable. I think they’re suspicious enough to be wary of trusting them but there’s no smoking gun, yet there wasn’t a smoking gun that CryptoAG was a CIA cut-out until some unauthorized leaks nearly a half century after they gained control and use of it. We know they have an interest in subverting encryption, in going fishing among “interesting” targets who might seek to use privacy-conscious services and among dissidents outside the west they may wish to vet and recruit.
True privacy advocates should not be throwing in with the agenda of any regime or bloc, especially those who so trample human and privacy rights as that of the US and co. They should be roundly suspicious of all power.
In other words, honeypot. And an US plant in Switzerland…
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I remember mullvad has less servers than proton and I hear they get blacklisted often. Have you encountered anything like this?
I’ve been “blocked by network security” on reddit. Switching to the next server resolves the issue.
Same here with proton
I want to preface this question by saying that I’m not trolling and I’m not defending Proton. I’m genuinely confused at the reaction to this article.
I’m also upset with Proton’s recent comments, specifically the December tweet and subsequent responses, and I’m evaluating my use of Proton.
Near as I can tell, this article (which I did read) lays out the facts about Deepseek as an LLM originating in China and the implications of that.
Why is this article a reason to pile on proton?
Proton had a reputation for being the good guy. In the span of a month, we saw them bend the knee, flip flop and throw shade at competition; all while pretending to be the hero. We essentially have to trust them with our data and they are showing signs that they are willing to act against that trust with worrisome agendas and biases. It’s not a good look, and since this marketing to users key issues, it’s going to cause some responses.
That’s fair. I suppose people will have their pitchforks and will pile on anything at this point
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.
The reason a very small subset of users love it*
All the downloads making it the top app in the app stores are from people using their centralized service. The people behind these downloads have no clue that you can run it locally or can even start to understand what that would even mean. It is this usage the article is addressing.
Like the thread starter, I am also confused to why this in particular draws so much hate.
Guys I know OpenAI is not clear, its as bad as deepseek and even worse, BUT you have to realize, that most people don’t give a fuck about running deepseek locally, they just download deepsek app and use it, which is more privacy intrusive even than ClosedAI. Giving information to China, when you live on the west is like giving russians information, when you live in Ukraine. We are on constant war with China, because we are democratic, they are communism, and we cannot just give them our data for free, therefore I have to admit PROTON IS RIGHT about deepseek being “deepsneak”
Is China in the room with you right now?
we are democratic, they are communism, and we cannot just give them our data for free,
You got a lot to learn but this statement gave me serious loolz
As a queer person I don’t really care at this point if China or Russia is tracking me. They aren’t the ones who are currently stripping me and others of rights and so many other things.
I don’t trust any governments on this front, but the government I live under is way more of a concern.
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Russia specifically is a big part of why trump is in power. They weren’t the sole contributors, but they definitely helped a lot. And they achieved it by buying, stealing, and collecting data on people and doing targeting misinformation campaign.
oh yea its russias fault that most americans voters are bigot reactionaries.
That’s… Not actually a reasonse to what was said?
Sure, that’s all fine and dandy. But it doesn’t change the point that was being made.
The election happened. Here and now, Russia and China tracking me is no different than the US. They’re all authoritarian governments hell bent on stripping rights away.
Now I’m not the same person you replied to. I’m in Canada, so I’m weary of all of them. But if I was in the states, I’d RATHER give my data to an advisory that won’t do much with it. As apposed to the current government hellbent on making life for me and my trans siblings as hard and difficult as possible.
Nothing ever “happened” . Politics is an ongoing process. Putin actively wants the west in disarray and in chaos, China wants it to be weak and submissive. They use the data they buy and gather to achieve that. And if you think Putin has nothing to do with rampant queerphobia, you just ignorant about him
But again, how is that any different to me, as a Canadian, than an American social media company?
All of that is still true.
All the US companies have kissed the ring and are bowing to facsim.
Western social media still has its own agenda. And it’s not human Rights either.
If russia had manipulated the election, it would have been in favor of biden
Propaganda got ya good bud. Sure. It’s important but Jesus. Lol. ChatGPT does the same shit but doesn’t let me run it locally. Fuck ChatGPT
China is not communist, they are market-captialistic, one-party highly authoritarian state. “socialism” and “cmmunism” is just used to make them sound better and more legitimate than they are.
Are you even a communist?
Name all AES
lib parrot comment
The PRC has a Socialist Market Economy. The presence of private ownership in an economy isn’t enough to determine its structure, otherwise the inverse would apply and the US’s publicly owned structures would make it Socialist. Rather, what determines the “label” of an economy is which is primary, public ownership and planning, or markets and profits, and where its heading. Ie, do markets serve the interests of the public sector and are subservient to it, or does the public sector serve the private sector and the pursuit of profits?
I would argue that it is about incentives. A market economy is about maximizing profit, so that (the class of) shareholders get more money out of it, than they put into it. Incentivising making money means you incentives a race to the bottom, producing lots of expensive and addicting crap that easily breaks for as little cost as possible. And you incentivise massive consumption of it.
A socialist economy should instead incentivise improving the world for all the people that live in it. Produce stuff that is robust, adaptable, sustainable and so on. Incentivise the mindfulness of the social and ecological impact of each product. And if someone needs something special, incentivise local makerspaces etc. that allows people to produce custom stuff in low quantities.
To be clear, the PRC is more driven by the latter than the former, see the Belt and Road Initiative and the massive expenditure on green energy and poverty eradication. They are focused on developing the Productive Forces, but have reached a level of development that allows them to tackle the issues you describe in your second paragraph.
China isn’t communist and America isn’t democratic. They both suck way worse than that.
“I don’t care if rus or china”… Guys you really don’t think. If you lived in Ukraine, would you care about giving russians address where you live? Then why you don’t care giving them your data, when you live on the west? Because we are not physically fighting rus/china doesn’t mean we are not on the war with them. I said it is great Deepseek is possible to host locally, but no one cares, everyone use their app anyway, and this is the problem, as it is even worse than using ClosedAI.
I want Russia to win (and it will) and I want China to win (and it will). My use of an LLM isn’t going to make one lick of difference one way or the other, but if it did, I would help it in any and every conceivable way.
You are a fucking nerd for thinking you have more “privacy” to lose to China than to the profiteering, rent-seeking silicon valley bastards who are already and right now exploiting the fuck outta you.
I’d better be a “fucking nerd” that invented all that shit that you use now, than a fucking idiot who doesn’t ever use brain and probably lives in a fucking america. But I like how so many kids think communism is good, when they live in a democratic freedom country. Read some books, use this technology for something else instead bullshit, as you don’t know the world yet.
Lol, I have been reading theory for almost 2 decades now, kid.
I even taught at a community college for a while.Listen, this is clearly a case of “every accusation a confession” - that is to say, you are well aware of your own naivete and so you project it onto others as a defense mechanism. Fortunately, there is a cure for that sort of ignorance, and in large part it does indeed involve reading theory and exposing yourself to perspectives that may seem frightening due to your having been awash in a sea of propaganda all your life. Come join our Das Kapital reading group on hexbear (hosted by the awesome @Cowbee@hexbear.net) and maybe learn a little something about the real world you’re so painfully unaware of.
Thanks for the shout-out, comrade! For anyone that wants to join, we are a month in so it will take a bit of aggressive reading to catch-up, but we do have archived links for past threads, both for this year and last year’s, so you can go through those threads and get up to speed.
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.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.
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.
of course, move the ducking goalposts! buying a big yacht is also achievable, technically! but very little of the people can actually do it.
don’t forget what did OP say:
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
don’t believe me? look at the post text. this is as large a misunderstanding as the Eiffel Tower. Virtually nobody can run it on their private devices, that fraction of a percent is basically a rounding error.
I’m so tired of this fucking bullshit. but let’s hate proton for it if that’s what’s trendy!
There are plenty of other online platforms where you can use the unmodified model without siphoning your data to China. The model itself is just an offline blob and doesn’t need to be modified to make a “more secure” and “privacy friendly” version like the article says it does, because the model is not tasked with collecting and sharing your data. The author doesn’t seem to be aware of that.
except that the model is not offline if you access it through yet another online service, doing who knows what with your data
The platform you’re using is indeed an online platform with its own data practices, but that’s common sense and has nothing to do with this model being Chinese. It’s up to the user to decide wether or not to use online AI services at all and which ones (not) to trust. The model itself isn’t doing anything with your data.
