Proton launches LLM and crypto wallet
Proton launches LLM and crypto wallet
Proton Wallet is an easy-to-use self-custodial wallet that makes financial freedom attainable for everyone.
Proton launches LLM and crypto wallet
Proton Wallet is an easy-to-use self-custodial wallet that makes financial freedom attainable for everyone.
We asked for Linux native apps and collabrative office suites not this garbage.
They need Linux developers to do that
Linux needs linux developers
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.
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.
Like this collaborative document editor they added a month ago?
Yes I am aware. Thats a great start but its pretty barebones and needs far more developement.
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?
What, sending bitcoin? That's not really a feature of Proton Mail, rather it's a feature of the wallet that happens to be able to send bitcoin via email (I suppose so that the recipient can then transfer the funds to a bitcoin address of their choice unless their email address is already linked to Proton Wallet).
Even if you'd consider this a feature of Proton Mail, how does this have higher priority than a proper iPad/tablet app, or the ability to add a .ics attachment directly to my (default, non-Proton) calendar without having to manually download the .ics file, open it with a file manager and then add it to the calendar? Filtered views (for example: view unread and starred messages but nothing else in one list)? A somewhat usable offline mode? The list goes on, and that's just Proton Mail. Proton Drive still lacks a native Linux app (I know there's "support" for Proton Drive in rclone, but that's hacked together because Proton doesn't even provide official API documentation and stability commitments).
I'd rather pay for the individual services that I can actually (somewhat) use, like Mail (even though it's not great), but their Mail only tier severely lacks in features (only 1 custom email domain is my main problem). If they'd then commit the financial resources towards improving the service being paid for, that'd be great.
Maybe they should get search working first? Or just contacts sync?
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.
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.
Oh wow, they're hitting all the shitty gimmicks in one fell swoop!
Tech companies are committed to turning satire into reality.
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.
Crypto and AI, they went all out...
Waiting for sweet nfts to drop.
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
Bitcoin isn't private, you can see how much BTC a sender or recipient is holding and what transactions they've made. I'd argue that without privacy mitigations such as a mixing service it's even less private than credit cards. They should have gone with Monero instead.
You can make as many Bitcoin addresses as you want. You can look up an addresses balance but not a wallet's balance. It's not as clear as you're making it sound.
Bitcoin over Lightning is much, much more opaque, and it's where the majority of Bitcoin transactions are now occurring. You can't look up somebody's balance. The only people who know about the transaction are you, the recipient, and any intermediary nodes used to forward the transaction. Privacy is continuing to improve on lightning and main chain.
It's not supposed to be private. However it's very effective at being pseudo-anonymous
Does it need to be private?
I can't run my drug empire without privacy!
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.
they say in the post that they’d like to add support for more options in future so i’ll wait to see what they add. another fully open source wallet is always a good thing i guess.
It's a self-custody wallet and open source. It's regular main-chain BTC but it does automatic address rotation. Unfortunately it doesn't support lightning, which is where the majority of Bitcoin transactions occur. Lightning offers significantly increased privacy, sub-second transactions and fees measuring in pennies.
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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scTjHvot3Uo To those who downvote, haven't you learned that centralisation of services always ends horribly, remember Reddit, twitter, Google, remember why do we go to lemmy, why do we use Linux and self host services, because we wanted decentralised system that won't enshitify as a whole, even if something goes bad, like meta's threads, you can isolate it, yes? But if everything was centralised like in Facebook and others, could you do the same thing? Of course not, never forget folks, centralisation never goes well in the long run, but in short term it's gonna be great if course
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.
So much for my plan of looking into a Proton mail account.
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.
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.
I did that here, using the iCloud custom domain setup in lieu of google.
Works fine assuming you have some iOS / Mac devices.
Proton is so based ngl like fr fr