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Proton’s CEO Cancels AI ‘Re-Interviews’ (www.404media.co)
submitted 1 week ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[+] -93 points 1 week ago (34 children)

His words are aggressively out of touch, but I will say that I agree somewhat. I tried going back to handcrafting code for a bit and it really does feel slow. Like, "absolutely no way to compete in the current market" slow.

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  • [–] 92 points 1 week ago* (4 children)

    Slow has nothing to do with pen testing or not. Pen testing is how you validate that the code is secure, AI or no. This is showing a shocking lack of care about security for a company pretending to offer a secure product.

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  • [+] -38 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    Without the entire slack exchange, it's not clear whether Andy Yen was responding exclusively to the call for pentesting, or towards broader comments about AI code.

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  • [–] 57 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    Look I'll be honest, a CEO telling his workers their (valid) opinions are bullshit and looser thinking is absolutely unacceptable, even putting the context of security (or lack thereof) aside. If you refuse to listen to your engineers as a leadership, you have failed miserably.

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  • [–] 65 points 1 week ago (6 children)

    Speed is not a good quantifier for industry success. Speed to market might get you some initial customers, but speed alone won't keep them. If your product is junky, slow, and insecure you are going to lose those customers you had, and potentially open yourself up to lawsuits in the process.

    The things that matter more to long term success and sustainability are all the things AI is not.

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  • [+] -19 points 1 week ago* (4 children)

    I never said speed was all that mattered. But from my experience, and my other friends in the industry, it is possible to achieve speed while maintaining quality. security, and maintainability. Because these are all things that the AI can look for too. Just look at how many vulnerabilities AI is finding nowadays. Just like any other product manager, you can bring up concerns, ask the AI to look into them, and validate the AI's claims. Just like you would manage a team of engineers. Which is of course still faster than writing everything yourself.

    If all you ask the AI to do is produce lines of code, that's all it will do. But AI workflows can be far more complex than that.

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  • [–] 41 points 1 week ago (3 children)

    The quote is talking about how the CEO is scoffing at an engineer asking for a few days for pentesting. None of that has to do with using or not using AI for coding. Doesn't matter who wrote the code, the management of a privacy first company looking to cut corners on testing for buggy code is a no no for their customers.

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  • [–] -1 points 6 days ago (2 children)

    Without the whole slack context, the pentesting comment might have been part of a whole chain of comments trying to discredit AI, and the CEO is trying to push for AI. I wouldn't jump to saying the CEO is against pentesting in general until I had more information

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  • [–] 2 points 6 days ago (1 child)

    What part of insulting people that wants to take it slow makes sense as a response to a chain of comments discrediting AI? You're twisting your whole body trying to invent hypotheticals that doesn't even make sense.

    Why are you making yourself look foolish to defend a company you have no financial or personal connection to? Unless you actually do.

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  • [–] 0 points 6 days ago

    Recall that I already mentioned that his comments seemed aggressively out of touch. Insulting your engineers is a bad look.

    However, I'm saying that he isn't necessarily against pentesting, which is what some comments seem to be thinking. I would want to read the whole context to see if that's what he really believes.

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  • [–] 23 points 1 week ago (6 children)

    My job is not to be fast. This expectation of development speed is bosses not understanding why they hire specialists.

    I code, make sure it works, is secure and maintainable. That's how I own my work.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 days ago (5 children)

    as mentioned in another comment, it's possible to make it secure and maintainable if you manage AI properly. Managing AI is like a product manager managing a team. It's up to you to push for security and maintainability, but AI can absolutely look for vulnerabilities and holes and code smells if you ask for it.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 days ago (4 children)

    Yet somehow speed seems all that matters to c-suits.

    Coming back to my point: slower ≠ worse.
    Can AI speed things up? Oh, yes. Is it really better? It depends, but I'm leaning to no.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 days ago (3 children)

    I don't think Andy Yen was saying that slower = worse, or that faster is all that matters. My read of the conversation is that engineers were pushing against AI saying that it makes code less secure and maintainable, and Andy was pushing back saying that's not necessarily the case, that it's possible to use AI to speed things up while maintaining quality.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 days ago (2 children)

    In one exchange, an employee in the company’s security Slack channel urged Proton to at least take a few days to pentest newly written code before pushing it live. “That’s bullshit and loser thinking. Of course it’s possible to be fast and secure,” Yen wrote in the channel at the end of August. “Stop thinking always of how to be slower, and focus more on how to be faster.” Yen added, “stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more.”

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  • [–] 1 point 5 days ago (1 child)

    There was a Lemmy post about a Proton employee providing more context for Andy's statements: https://no.lastname.nz/post/4106893

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  • [–] 1 point 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

    Good thing he apologised, yet it still looks that the c-suit still mostly concerned with speed. Apologizing for shitty behaviour is still worse than not being shitty in the first place.

    FYI, I don't think this situation is cause enough to ditch Proton, but I still stand by my original comment.

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  • [–] 42 points 1 week ago (5 children)

    It only feels slow when everyone is forced to use AI, none of these companies have proven to operate at a profit yet

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  • [+] -37 points 1 week ago (4 children)

    Huh? The frontier model companies aren't operating at a profit but all the major enterprise tech companies (Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon, etc) are using huge amounts of AI in the SDLC and beyond and certainly are operating at a profit...

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  • [–] 15 points 1 week ago

    I’m not sure what you are trying to say, what difference does it make if the users of a product are profitable when the creator of said product isn’t, the users of AI make their money on a diversified portfolio of products, the AI companies are making no profits right now as the subscription prices they are charging are at a loss to gain market share, if they don’t find a sustainable profit margin over time they will have to shut down or increase the cost of the subscription so only a limited number of companies and individuals will be able to afford it. Either way the gushing AI inference taps will stop leaking so freely at some point.

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  • [–] 4 points 6 days ago (1 child)

    Every single one of those companies reported negative free cash flow this quarter, and some have been running in the negative for a lot longer. The only tech company at that scale NOT losing money hand over fist is Apple, and they're the only one not investing heavily in AI... but I'm sure that's just a coincidence.

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  • [–] 0 points 6 days ago

    Microsoft and Salesforce both have very positive free cash flow... but in any case that isn't profit. All 4 of the companies I listed are still very profitable (Alphabet/google being the one "exception" where they are still wildly profitable but down from q3 2024 vs q3 2026). But even in the Alphabet and Amazon cases, they have negative free cash flow because they are investing like crazy in AI. This doesnt mean they aren't profitable it means they are using their historic performance to make a big bet on the future. This is fundamentally very different from the frontier lab companies who have never been profitable and are staying afloat mostly from cash injection from big tech (Anthropic is an interesting one that may have just turned the corner).

    It's fine to have moral, labor, or environmental objections to "AI" (which is a very stupid name for some specific applications of machine learning) but I would expect Lemmy to have a higher level of discourse around this stuff that is actually rooted in reality.

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  • [–] 16 points 6 days ago (5 children)

    You might be able to ship a codebase quicker but once it hits a certain level of complexity, you'll have a codebase that no single human being on your team really understands. You'll now be forever tied to an ever increasing AI subscription cost

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  • [–] -1 points 6 days ago (4 children)

    which may still be worth it to secure a strong position in the market. You have to look at what competition Proton is facing (Google Workspace)

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  • [–] 1 point 6 days ago (1 child)

    But this is exactly why this is so fucking stupid. Most people didn't switch to proton because their suite is better than google performance or feature wise. The google apps work just fine. You switch exactly because google is an unethical shit company, that harvests your data on top.. If proton adopts the same values why the fuck would I stay with them..

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  • [–] 17 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    sounds like a "you" problem

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  • [+] -28 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 child)

    "skill issue" comments are rarely productive. I have many friends that also work in the industry that feel the same, even if they are against AI. I trust their opinions (and my own of course) over yours.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

    cool. trust your -20 down voted comment

    EDIT - and wait, let's clarify. I NEVER SAID "skill issue". my implication wasn't necessarily "it's because you're slow", it was "good things take time". have some patience.

    LLMs erode normal human patience and skills. your skills will thank you for the time you invest.

    EDIT 2 - I also work in the industry. you've probably used something I helped build. I'm telling you, with the experience to back it up, that you're only hurting yourself and helping the ruling class.

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