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Proton freezes Swiss investment over surveillance fears (lenews.ch)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/44874398

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[–] 70 points 1 year ago* (19 children)

They need to fire their CEO and get an executive suite that can develop good products and not just copy Google while adding keywords related to "privacy" and "freedoms" in their marketing copytext.

That's the exact same thing as Google.

I say this as long time Proton user and subscriber.

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  • [–] 100 points 1 year ago (7 children)

    Imo, having Proton just copy Google but actually be private is exactly what I want. Of course, if they stray away from privacy then there will be issues. I also feel like they are making good stuff. As a subscriber myself I don't have many issues with their offering other than the stuff they don't provide but Google does.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

    I don't believe they will be able to compete with Google/OpenAI in a direct battle by having a 1:1 LLM product copy but with privacy. The costs are likely too high for an organisation like Proton and their LLM is likely to have significantly subpar output.

    Don't get me wrong, I am all for a private, cloud LLM, but I would rather they came up with novel usability features, a better front-end for evaluating sources (and faster identification of errors and hallucinations) and so on.

    I am not seeing any of that.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Fair enough, I would also prefer if they pushed out an online excel/power point alternative before this or or allowed for more cloud storage.

    That being said, I also don't think this is a bad thing to do. It seems to work alright so if they can at least be at that level then that's fantastic. I do wish they pooled their resources with other open source AI models cause that would be more efficient but maybe they have a good reason. I've just not looked into it cause I don't use AI that often

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    I use LLMs as a complement to search and Luma is far worse than even Le Chat from Mistral for moderately complex prompts.

    Luma is also notable slower (to an unacceptable level).

    I would they rather they focused on existing services. I use their email services and it's pretty good. Based on reviews, it seems that their cloud storage offering isn't on that level.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago

    I don't believe they will be able to compete with Google/OpenAI in a direct battle

    I don't know about that. From my experience, community AI models (both image generation and LLMs) are often far, far superior to whatever large corporations can dish out within the same size bracket

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  • [–] 71 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    I mean.... Why not?

    I want Gmail without Google. Protonmail sells that to me, seems like a win/win.

    Same for other services.

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  • [+] -13 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I don't think they can make a direct competitor. An LLM is expensive to run and getting a good LLM model requires lots of spend.

    I like the idea of a private cloud LLM, but based on my experience with Mistral (an EU based LLM service), it is noticeably less useful than ChatGPT and especially Gemini for work use cases.

    Bases on some basic test prompts (related to finding sources and documents related to specific parts of government budgets in different countries all around the world), Lumo did not perform well. Only some general suggestions for sources were provided.

    It would be great to see Lumo improve, but I have my doubts.

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  • [–] 32 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    The difference is that Google scans your private correspondence and can report you to authorities for any reason, legit or not.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    That's a fair argument. Although I personally wouldn't put too much emphasis on "can report you to authorities for any reason". That's true of any third party, your local mini-mart can report you to the authorities for any reason, legit or not.

    I am referring more to the Lumo LLM initiative. It's a standard LLM pitch with some privacy copytext added on.

    While I haven't tried Lumo, I do have experience with smaller cloud LLMs (e.g. Mistral, trying to not use American services) and they tend to be subpar for my work use cases.

    I don't see how Lumo will compete with ChatGPT or Gemini (haven't tried Grok for obvious reasons).

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Although I personally wouldn't put too much emphasis on "can report you to authorities for any reason"

    They literally sent police after some poor dude based on their correspondence with a doctor

    https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/08/googles-scans-private-photos-led-false-accusations-child-abuse

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Google does not have the authority to "send the police". They reported content that looked like CSAM and the police did what police do and assumed the guy was a criminal.

    The problem is not that they reported it, the problem is that they had it in the first place.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago

    Agreed, that's pretty fucked up.

    However, on some level it's to be expected that 3rd parties may report you if they feel you are engaging illegal activities (especially on their premises).

    While I don't support technological backdoors, there are legitimate for society to engage in surveillance. It's the responsibility of voters to make sure that this is done in a responsible and transparent manner.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago*

    Although I personally wouldn't put too much emphasis on "can report you to authorities for any reason". That's true of any third party

    Not true of Proton.

    I don't see how Lumo will compete with ChatGPT or Gemini

    The same way it competes with all their other products; by making it private and open source.

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