Technology

The wallet is not, I think, surprising. Proton Mail is billed as a trusted holder of email that you want private. In the US, there are specifically some people who want an out-of-country provider of email service. A lot of use of cryptocurrency is from people who want private financial transactions. I will bet that there is overlap in userbase.

I also don't know how they're billing their LLM service, but a thing that some people don't like about LLM services -- and I am among those -- is that what you write can be data-mined. If they're selling this as a service where they charge a fee not to do that, that might make a lot of sense in terms of their privacy company reputation.

I use Kagi as my search engine. They do the "we don't log or mine your data, but rather charge a subscription fee" thing too -- though unlike Proton, they're not overseas for US users -- so they're gonna be selling to a market of people who are willing to pay something for privacy. And they also just started providing LLM service. I bet that they have the same rationale.

You can get your own hardware and run latent diffusion software locally. I have. But that's expensive.

It saves a lot of money, if you only need the hardware computing N% of the time, to buy the hardware and share it with other people, both in compute capacity and cost. Then you only need to pay N% plus a bit for the service provider to make a return.

I suspect that a lot of companies have done the math, figured out that the economics work, and are aiming for that market -- people who want to use latent diffusion software, want privacy for use, but don't need them hot 100% of the time, and don't want to pay to get their own hardware at home.

It used to be common, when all computers were more expensive, for all computing access to be sold like this, on time-sharing systems. Nobody (or very few people!) could afford a computer of their own, but you could afford to buy some compute time on one. Some of this is probably temporary, because right now, Nvidia has a significant lead and can (and does) charge a fat premium; I assume that if AMD or someone else can get parity for compute acceleration, then that'll force Nvidia's pricing down. But it may be that there's a whole new world of interesting applications that can only be done with very large models that require very large hardware, in which case we might see, on an ongoing basis and for parallel compute applications, a world that looks more like the 1960s for computers, where there are a limited number of computers in datacenters, and instead of owning your own, you buy slices of time on them.

EDIT: Yeah, I haven't looked at Proton recently, but look at their main page. They're selling a whole suite of online services, and the whole thing that they're billing themselves as on the thing is providing privacy, and they specifically emphasize that they're in Switzerland. The slogan that they're using is "Proton: Privacy by default". My guess is that basically, their aim is to build a reputation of someone who is neither data-mining people's data nor is readily-accessible to law enforcement (well, if you're in the US...things might be different if you're Swiss!), and then to sell services with that aspect as a selling point.