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.
this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2025
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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.
Then by default it should never be considered safe. Honestly, this "open" release... it makes me wonder about ulterior motives.
Seems reasonable to think part of the motivation is disrupting American tech like openAI
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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.
They very much do not believe that open source means safe or private. They have a tons of articles talking about the hurdles they have gone through to try and ensure they are, and where and when they have failed to do so.
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).
Deepseek's R1 was built entirely on a multi-stage reinforcement learning process, and they pretty much open sourced that entire pipeline. By contrast, OpenAI has been giving us nothing but "look what we did" since GPT-3, and we're supposed to trust them.
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!
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Now this is something people can be mad at
Proton working overtime to discourage me from renewing.
It would be fair if ChatGPT or any american service received the same treatment, but the only article I found from 2023 seems quite neutral :/
We actually it seems quite fair-ish 🤷
AI has the potential to be a truly revolutionary development, one that could drive advancement for centuries. But it must be done correctly. These companies stand to make billions of dollars in revenue, and yet they violated our privacy and are training their tools using our data without our permission. Recent history shows we must act now if we’re to avoid an even worse version of surveillance capitalism.
Also from 2023 : https://proton.me/blog/ai-gdpr
I don’t see how what they wrote is controversial, unless you’re a tankie.
Given that you can download Deepseek, customize it, and run it offline in your own secure environment, it is actually almost irrelevant how people feel about China. None of that data goes back to them.
That's why I find all the "it comes from China, therefore it is a trap" rhetoric to be so annoying, and frankly dangerous for international relations.
Compare this to OpenAI, where your only option is to use the US-hosted version, where it is under the jurisdiction of a president who has no care for privacy protection.
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Yeah the article is mostly legit points that if your contacting the chatpot in China it is harvesting your data. Just like if you contact open AI or copilot or Claude or Gemini they're all collecting all of your data.
I do find it somewhat strange that they only talk about deep-seek hosting models.
It's absolutely trivial just to download the models run locally yourself and you're not giving any data back to them. I would think that proton would be all over that for a privacy scenario.
It might be trivial to a tech-savvy audience, but considering how popular ChatGPT itself is and considering DeepSeek's ranking on the Play and iOS App Stores, I'd honestly guess most people are using DeepSeek's servers. Plus, you'd be surprised how many people naturally trust the service more after hearing that the company open sourced the models. Accordingly I don't think it's unreasonable for Proton to focus on the service rather than the local models here.
I'd also note that people who want the highest quality responses aren't using a local model, as anything you can run locally is a distilled version that is significantly smaller (at a small, but non-trivial overalll performance cost).
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Anyone promoting LLMs without a big side of skepticism is exposing their bias.
Glad I steered clear of Proton, change my mind. No wait, don't.