This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I expected more from them, even more so when they turned into a non profit.
I have no interest in it, but Bitcoin wallets aren't necessarily private, and they say the LLM is also private. Given that pretty much everything is trying to mine as much data as possible from your digital interactions, this seems on brand for them.
I still have no interest in Proton Unlimited, but maybe enough of their customers want these features (or they think they will).
Yeah, but their llm doesn't even disclose where it gathered its training data, very sus.
Techradar says it's based on the Mistral 7B large language model. But they should definitely disclose that kind of information. It's important to know how a tool works and what kind of mistakes, biases etc are to be expected when using it for important communication.
They is no chance they are the one training it. It costs hundreds of millions to get a descent model. Seems like they will be using mistral, who have scrapped pretty much 100% of the web to use as training data.
It has to be very good with porn stuff, in that case 🤔
yes, you can download SD1.5 models that will generate all kinds of degenerate images for you and deneutered LLMs that will write the most disgusting smut you've ever seen. all of it locally, free and 100% private.
Nice 🧐 got to do some research
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, 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", 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.
Yeah, sharing hardware is pretty cool, but right now, both cripto and LLMs have a very bad reputation (at least among those more tech savvy), and them releasing these products makes some people (like me) feel that maybe they are just grifters... (I was considering kagi search, as pretty much all free search engines are garbage, but now i'm reconsidering lol [it was ou of my budget anyway]).
Maybe my flashlight app can do it next.
It ain't a real flashlight app if it can't automatically flash to vibe with any songs heard from the background
All of this convinced me to give up on moving all my accounts to their service and just use the iCloud service I already pay for. Trying to get away from GMail and Google’s privacy policies, but it felt like these moves indicated greater change coming to a service I was sincerely optimistic about prior.
Yeah, I actually quite liked their VPN and was thinking about upgrading, now its a no go lol.
Altho I wouldn't recommend you to give up on your privacy, maybe you can create a NAS or something, but don't give up on your rights!
I won't be using these features, but I'm not sure there's cause for concern. The implementation seems very sensible and legitimately privacy-centric. The LLM runs locally and is meant as an very basic email proofreader. The crypto wallet is a likely an extension of the password management tech they've already developed, with transaction features that some people care about.
I can see why some people want these features, and I'm glad there are new alternatives.
Coming from someone who hasn't gotten into the weeds with this company, my understanding was that they did email. I was considering migrating over to them in order to de-google completely.
This move, specifically, has caused me to reconsider and scrap those plans. Not every tech company needs to peddle ai and crypto bullshit.
... they do email, but they also do other things. They still do email better than the alternatives.
It's kind of like if Chipotle came out with hamburgers and you were like "well I want a burrito but I'll never get one of their burritos now, they're just like all the other fast food now."
We asked for Linux native apps and collabrative office suites not this garbage.
They need Linux developers to do that
Linux needs linux developers
Linux has developers. It just needs more desktop users.
Im trying!
OK get Linux developers then. we pay for the Software and they asked us what we want them to work on. This is one of the rare cases where Linux users can actually feel entitled to developer attention.
Except it's cheaper to pay their existing non-Linux developers to do something than hire a team of new developers for Linux.
They need a simple GUI on top of rclone. The madlads of rclone fucking reversed engineered the drive APIs in record time. Now imagine if they were to tosh some money into that project, and then could focus only in GUI.
They didn't have to reverse engineer the drive API. Proton created an open source library to use their API, which was forked to integrate with Proton-API-Bridge, so that apps could easily use it.
Tech companies are committed to turning satire into reality.
They should stop adding more and more services and instead focus on making existing services better or - in some cases - feature complete first.
Like proton mail? The existing service that this update is adding a feature to?
Crypto and AI, they went all out...
Waiting for sweet nfts to drop.
I feel like some people just hear "crypto" or "ai" and start screeching and clawing at the air.
Not every feature needs to be for you specifically, these features are optional and don't compromise or even impact their other products. They seem to be on-brand in being more privacy-focused alternatives to some of the existing market options while remaining accessible, and keeps Proton in the game depending on how the landscape develops.
I don't use Proton (yet) but I generally like what they're doing and hope they succeed, and I don't see any of these developments as negatives, just more competition.
I expected more from them, even more so when they turned into a non profit.
Two points to make:
LLMs are expensive power hungry beasts of limited use.
Crypto is similarly a power hungry beast. It's also primarily a niche pseudo currency that's arguably more regularly used for crime than legitimate purchases.
"Feed what you wish to grow" applies here ... and TBH I'm okay with what they've done with the LLM. The crypto wallet ... I just wish we'd let crypto die. Bitcoin in particular is too unstable for the average person to use as some kind of normal currency. People also see it as an investment, but it's a super questionable investment that is backed only by the arbitrary value we give it.
Nothing wrong with a crime currency, easier to get safe drugs.
The issue is that they're neglecting their core apps in favor of expanding their portfolio. There's nothing wrong with creating these apps, but it should not be done until the core apps are industry leading and extremely refined.
The developers they used to create this wallet could have been used to fix protonmail bugs, or to bring protonvpn on Linux up to snuff. There's still no first party CLI for Linux boxes, for example.
It doesn't seem proton is neglecting their core apps, instead it seems they are getting more people, so each service has enough people. https://proton.me/careers
I will say, I disagree with this perspective as a developer.
Adding more people doesn't inherently make the product better. You can have too many cooks in the kitchen and too many people stepping on each other's toes.
It's like the saying 9 women can't make a baby in a month.
I think the other apps are moving at a reasonable pace. Though I do wish they'd put some more people on Linux desktop apps... Maybe even a Linux distribution "Proton OS" could be very interesting.
Checking with proton themself, the main reason seems to be to further resistance in case another instance of a issue they had in initial funding, where paypal blocked all payments to them. A wallet was also heavily requested by business users, and proton is using randomization to reduce tracking detailed on their site. So long as they next work on environmental impact to balance out this stuff, proton is fine still. Here is the code for the wallet: https://github.com/ProtonWallet
The reason they don't support Monero at the moment is due to a few reasons, one of those being, proton doesn't want to be a main support for illegal activity which means while they may adopt it eventually, they will be a late adopter. Proton is for privacy, not anonymity.
cringe. monero is basically the only viable cryptocurrency. the rest is just for gambling.
I've been pretty happy with my swap to Proton lately, but this makes me nervous.
Not that I hate AI or crypto, but their mail app, the thing they're known for, is not feature complete on all platforms. I still cannot set or edit filters on mobile, for example.
If your flagship app is missing basic features that users have reported for months but you just keep rolling out new shit, it starts to feel like too much like Google, yakno?
Agree on Crypto, but the LLM is literally a Proton Mail feature.
Proton is so based ngl like fr fr
Proton Wallet caught me off guard, especially since people have been asking for basic features forever. Questionable decision making. But I guess if I ever get interested in bitcoin or crypto in general for some reason, I trust Proton to make a good product that aligns with my principles. Upset they don't support Monero though.
And I like the LLM proofreader. That's just a genuinely useful feature to me.
i am surprised they went with bitcoin and not a privacy focused coin like monero
Honestly, if they can prove they don't have access to the keys, I might use their wallet, but BTC doesn't interest me at all because fees are high and it fluctuates too much, making it useless as a currency, and Monero is the opposite in both regards.
It's open source, and it's fully self-custody which are two important features. Having a wallet directly integrated into the e-mail client is nice, being able to send payments to other users just knowing their e-mail address instead of their public key is pretty cool. It does automatic address rotation to preserve privacy. Wish it supported lightning for cheaper/faster transactions and additional privacy but hopefully that feature comes in time.
