I expected more from them, even more so when they turned into a non profit.
They should stop adding more and more services and instead focus on making existing services better or - in some cases - feature complete first.
Proton mail launches LLM and crypto wallet
Submitted 3 months ago by ChilledPeppers@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://proton.me/blog/proton-wallet-launch
Comments
narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee 3 months ago
EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Like proton mail? The existing service that this date is adding a feature to?
narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee 3 months ago
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.
asdfasdfasdf@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Maybe they should get search working first? Or just contacts sync?
Telorand@reddthat.com 3 months ago
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).
ChilledPeppers@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Yeah, but their llm doesn’t even disclose where it gathered its training data, very sus.
hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 3 months ago
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.
L_Acacia@lemmy.one 3 months ago
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.
gamermanh@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 months ago
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?
EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Agree on Crypto, but the LLM is literally a Proton Mail feature.
bitwolf@lemmy.one 3 months ago
Oh wow, they’re hitting all the shitty gimmicks in one fell swoop!
tal@lemmy.today 3 months ago
The wallet is not, I think, surprising. Proton Mail is billed as a trusted holder of email that you want private. A lot of use of cryptocurrency is from people who want private financial transactions.
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 Kagis as my search engine. They do the “we don’t log or mine your data, but rather charge a subscription fee”. 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.
It used to be common, when all computers were more expensive, for all computing access to be sold like this, on time-sharing systems.
kibiz0r@midwest.social 3 months ago
Tech companies are committed to turning satire into reality.
FleetingTit@feddit.org 3 months ago
Crypto and AI, they went all out…
devfuuu@lemmy.world [bot] 3 months ago
Waiting for sweet nfts to drop.
todd_bonzalez@lemm.ee 3 months ago
I expected more from them, even more so when they turned into a non profit.
Two points to make:
- What did they do wrong here?
- Isn’t it better for these products to be provided by a nonprofit?
Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg 3 months ago
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.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
It’s also primarily a niche pseudo currency that’s arguably more regularly used for crime than legitimate purchases.
That’s true for cash as well, but that’s because of a few factors:
- credit cards are more attractive due to rewards
- sales tax makes buying things w/ cash a pain in person
- you can’t use cash online, the closest you have are debit cards, but breaches make that unsafe
Cryptocurrencies can solve these problems. Since it’s digital, there’s nothing physical to carry around, online purchases are secure, and some vendors charge a lower fee for accepting crypto (e.g. based.win has a 10% discount for Monero). Since it’s distributed, you’re not stuck w/ 3-4 “networks” to process transactions, so transaction fees are probably lower (e.g. Visa/Mastercard/etc generally charge ~3%, whereas Monero charges a few pennies).
The reason it’s more often used for crime is because few vendors accept cryptocurrency as payment, mostly because demand is low. The more people that use cryptocurrencies for legitimate purchases, the more companies will accept it and the ratio between legitimate vs criminal transactions will go down. I wouldn’t be surprised if cash is more often used for crime than legitimate purchases, mostly because cash is annoying to use. That doesn’t mean we should eliminate cash, it means we should make using it less annoying (e.g. include sales tax on listed price and not just calculated at checkout).
Zetta@mander.xyz 3 months ago
Nothing wrong with a crime currency, easier to get safe drugs.
eating3645@lemmy.world 3 months ago
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.
Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg 3 months ago
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.
GreenStar@lemmy.world 3 months ago
It doesn’t seem proton is neglecting their core apps, instead it seems they are getting more people, so each service has enough people. proton.me/careers
HKayn@dormi.zone 3 months ago
So why does Proton work on multiple products at the same time? Simply because:
- throwing more bodies at existing efforts has a point of diminishing returns and then a point when it even becomes counterproductive
- given the lengthy minimum time it takes to perfect services, starting earlier lets us deliver more to the community over the long term
That’s why we bring new services to market earlier than some of you would like, but I can also say that it’s never done if we believe it would compromise an existing effort.
db2@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Maybe my flashlight app can do it next.
lowleveldata@programming.dev 3 months ago
It ain’t a real flashlight app if it can’t automatically flash to vibe with any songs heard from the background
kate@lemmy.uhhoh.com 3 months ago
i am surprised they went with bitcoin and not a privacy focused coin like monero
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
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.
kate@lemmy.uhhoh.com 3 months ago
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.
makeasnek@lemmy.ml 3 months ago
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.
Zerfallen@lemmy.world 3 months ago
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.
Drewski@lemmy.sdf.org 3 months ago
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.
makeasnek@lemmy.ml 3 months ago
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.
bitwolf@lemmy.one 3 months ago
It’s not supposed to be private. However it’s very effective at being pseudo-anonymous
lud@lemm.ee 3 months ago
Does it need to be private?
yrmitz@lemmy.ml 3 months ago
I can’t run my drug empire without privacy!
FlorianSimon@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
Time to bail. Not giving these guys a cent more.
bruhduh@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Veedem@lemmy.world 3 months ago
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.
clothes@lemmy.world 3 months ago
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.
mriormro@lemmy.world 3 months ago
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.
gray@pawb.social 3 months ago
I did that here, using the iCloud custom domain setup in lieu of google.
Works fine assuming you have some iOS / Mac devices.
makeasnek@lemmy.ml 3 months ago
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.
GreenStar@lemmy.world 3 months ago
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: github.com/ProtonWallet
GreenStar@lemmy.world 3 months ago
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.
0laura@lemmy.world 3 months ago
cringe. monero is basically the only viable cryptocurrency. the rest is just for gambling.
CileTheSane@lemmy.ca 3 months ago
So much for my plan of looking into a Proton mail account.
TypicalHog@lemm.ee 3 months ago
Proton is so based ngl like fr fr
Fizz@lemmy.nz 3 months ago
We asked for Linux native apps and collabrative office suites not this garbage.
JCreazy@midwest.social 3 months ago
They need Linux developers to do that
Acters@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Linux needs linux developers
Fizz@lemmy.nz 3 months ago
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.
Railcar8095@lemm.ee 3 months ago
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.
EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Like this?
proton.me/blog/docs-proton-drive
Fizz@lemmy.nz 3 months ago
Yes I am aware. Thats a great start but its pretty barebones and needs far more developement.