Proton just joined the AI clown car show

Am I out of touch?

a writing assistant was one of the most requested features in our recent survey

Apparently, I am. People actually want this

For Proton Mail, 59% of respondents want an easier way to send end-to-end encrypted emails to non-Proton users, while 29% want a writing assistant for proofreading, grammar, and composing emails.

Nothing I hate more than not giving a link to the repo

Scribe relies on open source code and models, and is itself open source and therefore available for independent security and privacy audits

Not on their support page specifically for it either

Had to got to Reddit and look at their comments to find out they're using Mistral

https://reddit.com/comments/1e68sof/comment/ldsbs24

We built Scribe in r/ProtonMail using the open-source model Mistral AI to empower anyone in need of email productivity to use a privacy-respecting alternative to r/ChatGPT or r/GeminiAI that:
❌ doesn't log or save prompts
⛔️ doesn't use your data for training
🔎 open-source code that anyone can inspect
🖥️ can be run locally, so your data never leaves your device

See the official announcement here: https://proton.me/blog/proton-scribe-writing-assistant

https://huggingface.co/mistralai/Mistral-7B-v0.1/discussions/8

Hello, thanks for your interest and kind words! Unfortunately we're unable to share details about the training and the datasets (extracted from the open Web) due to the highly competitive nature of the field. We appreciate your understanding!

Apparently, I am. People actually want this
Thank you for recognizing this. It gets quite frustrating in threads like these about new AI tools being deployed when people declare "nobody wants this!" And I try to explain that there are actually people that do want it. I find many AI tools to be quite handy.
I tend to get vigorously downvoted at that point, as if that would make the demand "go away" somehow. But sticking heads in sand doesn't accomplish anything except to make people increasingly out of touch.
- I think that the point is it's entirely pointless building something like this into the email system. It should be a separate system that you can choose to use if you want it. Building it in just opens questions about exactly what they're doing with your data, despite their assurances.
- For me the issue here is, why put so much time and energy into basically rebranding an LLM. I've seen LLMs running on RPi and android phones. Why not write a blog post showing how to run LLMs locally with existing tools for the best privacy instead and put more focus on their existing services. It just seems like they're jumping on the AI bandwagon and charging a premium for an already freely available LLM.
  I see some benefits of AI like quality tts when using OSM and stt when transcribing/translating audio but other things like Googles AI answers and Microsofts Copilot leave me scratching my head wondering why consumer would want this
- This is one of those situations. People would eat sweet food if they didn't know it's bad for them. In fact they still eat shitloads while they do know it's bad. Same goes for opiates, and there's a reason why they are regulated in most of the world (the usa of course is fucked up with this). So yes, let's boil the fucking oceans so dumb fucks don't have to learn how to write a fucking email. Let's say people have to learn what kinds of shit are included with "ai", they have to learn how much it actually costs, what all of the nft cunts are now doing, and then say if they want something or not. I mean, this is all just fucking gaslighting by now, right? I don't care what a fucking ignorant shit thinks about mostly anything - but this is a shitty company telling us 'you want it so hard baby' so it can pump that ai investor hose SO HARD
The thing that pisses me off the most is that they are disingenuous almost to the point of lying in interpreting that survey's results. They say that 75% of users are interested in GenAI, when actually what they asked is whether people have used any GenAI at all in the recent past. And that still doesn't mean they want GenAI in Proton. That's a pretty significant sleight of hand. The more relevant question would have been the first one on what service people want the most. In that case only 29% asked for a writing assistant, which is still not the same thing as a full LLM. The most likely answer to "how many Proton customers want an LLM in Proton Mail" seems to be "few".
I think the philosophical concept of Open Source can't really work in ML models unless the training data is open as well. As it stands, these "open source" models are still very much a black box. Nobody was really questioning the implementation of the GPT.
- Yeah this would be like Google saying Google Search was "open source" because map-reduce was open, or something.

At least this one is open-source and quite privacy respecting

Yeah, and if that's the case, it seems like people just hate AI for the sake of it now.
LLM's are actually good at some things. Just not everything.
- LLM's are actually good at some things.
  Just look at the most recent ecological reports about it and combine them with the AI industry growth plans. You'll get an interesting perspective.
- They're really good at burning hug amounts of electricity.

I love how their blog posts say so much and so little at the same time - almost like they’ve been generated by a an LLM lmfao. I read the blog post and still couldn’t find out on what data their model is trained on.

Do we really need to grow our energy consumption as a society by such a disproportionate amount?
- this can run locally on your device which means probably doesn't consume that much energy
What benefit is there to "growth" for its own sake?

In 10 years, 90% of the population that has access to AI will be reduced to a flock without the ability to write a single birthday card.

were you also complaining about calculators?
- Kids these days don't learn cursive writing, it's destroying their literacy!
- I complain about human's laziness.
I know at least with art, AI is starting to eat itself with the massive output of content. AI is getting trained on more and more AI content and according to what I read at least its starting to affect new outputs.
Assuming thats true, it at least makes techie sense to me lol, I expect the same would happen to text based AI as well as more and more of the internet becomes exclusively AI generated.
- The term "model collapse" gets brought up frequently to describe this, but it's commonly very misunderstood. There actually isn't a fundamental problem with training an AI on data that includes other AI outputs, as long as the training data is well curated to maintain its quality. That needs to be done with non-AI-generated training data already anyway so it's not really extra effort. The research paper that popularized the term "model collapse" used an unrealistically simplistic approach, it just recycled all of an AI's output into the training set for subsequent generations of AI without any quality control or additional training data mixed in.

Just unsubscribed from them. I just use their mail.

they have been going downhill for a while, proton has worked with the feds without resistance bbc article

at least you can run it locally. Are you just complaining because you hate AI? There's a community for that, go complain there.

Is a paying customer not allowed to complain that they waste their time on chasing the next popular thing, instead of, I dunno, delivering important features promised years ago?
- I might be naive, but given how often its being done I have to imagine that of all the project initiatives at Proton, adding LLMs is a relatively easy integration, when you compare it do developing a native application. Im sure theres been work at proton for a long time on those features, its just that the LLM team did this project quickly.
- I do just want to point out that all the other paying customers also deserve the same say as you do, and in the survey linked multiple times in this thread this feature was the second-most requested feature of the Proton team by its users. It would be obtuse of the Proton team to ignore something a full third of its users want, no?
- New to Proton here. What important features were promised years ago?
- An AI writing assistant was one of the most requested features in their community survey. Trying to construct an outrage narrative on behalf of the consumer doesn't really work when the consumer literally voted for this.
- not really. You don't get to decide what the company does if you are a paying customer. I am a paying customer and I want this. If you don't like it you can just use your money elsewhere