Proton Lumo released – a privacy-focused chatbot built on an open source model – in mid-July,Then Updated in August Solved some early issues and I found myself using it more often than Chatgpt or Claude. In a world where internet companies have done a huge damage to our society, I am trying to find more ethical tools. But does Proton seriously think it can compete when competition offers more flickering features in exchange for a low price for user data?
If Eamonn Maguire, the head of machine learning at Proton, shared my concerns, he wouldn’t show it in an hour or so. If anything, I began to understand why he thought Lumo had found a valuable niche.
Protons started working on Lumo last year. scribe. The email writing tool is the company’s first foray into AI. According to Maguire, the scribe’s reception was “compared to [Proton] Think yes. Unlimited subscriptions. Internally, Scribe also changed Proton’s view of AI. Proton released its email client in 2014, almost a decade after Gmail made its debut in 2004. Meanwhile, Proton Drive arrives in 2020 or 2020 or eight years after Google Drive. The company believes that chatbots will not be late either.
“We know we need to act faster because it will be a big privacy issue,” Maguire said. After turning to the email market, Google turned to advertising and sold user data to fund Gmail’s operations. It’s a familiar scene where a Maguire thinks we’ve seen the AI chatbot again What I said recently XAI will show sponsored responsive advertisers along with Grok’s regular content. In other words, the establishment of AI Chatbots has begun.
The growth of open source models is one of the reasons Maguire believes Proton can compete with OpenAI and Google, among others. Open systems, especially those from China, may lag behind proprietary models adopted by users, but they begin to match them in test benchmarks. For example, Zhipu ai’s GLM-4.5 Currently ranked in the top 10 overall lmarena. Meanwhile, “all the top models are now starting to bring benchmarks together,” Maguire said. Even with some security concerns in the Chinese model, “Overall, open systems are competing, not just the ending [closed models]. ”
Lumo adopts a combination of smaller open source models that require less resources to run – especially Nemo, OpenHands 32B, Olmo 2 32B, and Mismtral Small3. Maguire thinks Proton’s approach can make it flexible. This is important for a company that has not yet raised venture capital funds and needs to consider building a sustainable business model from the outset. “A lot of people think they need the best model to get the best response. But I think it proves that you can get a very capable response from smaller models.”
For consumers, this also means that protons can offer Lumo for less. Like most chatbots, basic features are available for free, with the option to remove rate and token limits with a paid subscription. For Lumo, this costs $13 – less than $20 a month $200 level Many of them have begun to offer almost unlimited model usage.
Maguire recommends thinking this way: You can drive Formula 1 to the grocery store, but that will be too high. If you find LLM useful in your workflow, it’s very likely like Openai’s O3 Also meet your needs. Unless you are a researcher, you probably don’t need a system that can be recommended in minutes to solve a complex problem.
Similarly, if you’re just driving a sedan or crossover to complete your errands, what better represents the community you live digitally than in email and in your cloud storage. Lumo gets some benefits from being baked into the environment, just as many AI companies are trying to layer chatbots on top of desktop and mobile operating systems.
Another reason Maguire thinks that Protons have lenses for established chatbots is that, at the end of the day, they are all tools—some people are better suited to certain tasks than others. For example, anthropomorphic Claude systems are good at encoding, but they do not provide image generation. As a platform, chatbots will not benefit from it either Network Effect The same way as a social network (or sometimes entirely depends on its user data training policy).
Not surprisingly, at least one AI giant tried to change that. In April, edge It is reported that Openai is Test the chatgpt version This includes social feed generated to the image. Whether the user wants something like this remains to be seen, as bonding social elements to unrelated products often fails (See: Google+). Without social features, perhaps consumers will be more likely to jump between these tools, especially if they are confused by ads or involve more serious privacy violations.
In our conversation, I still don’t believe Lumo might have a niche for himself. I thought of Mozilla and its recent series of bad news, from layoffs affecting it Advocacy group closure pocket. Firefox is arguably a better browser than Chrome, with privacy features like this Powerful anti-orbit Build directly into the application. However, it has a small portion of the market share.
There is also an agi-sized elephant in the room. In pursuing a model that can match or surpass human intelligence in most missions, AI companies participated in a competition where only one winner could surpass human intelligence through Silicon and pay the king’s ransom to hire the top ideas in the field. In this case, what opportunities does a small player like Proton stand?
A sedan beats the sports car again, or perhaps a spaceship that extends the metaphor. “If your goal is to help people become more productive and learn better, do you need AGI? Probably not,” Maguire said. “We are not a fantasy, and everyone will be switching from Chatgpt to Lumo. Our goal is to provide the best ecosystem where people can do the most in the spell of protecting privacy.”
As of 2023Proton Mail has 100 million users. It’s a long way from the over 2 billion people using Gmail, but I don’t think anyone would convincedly think Proton Mail was a failure. The company is still growing strongly, and now joining space people like Sam Altman, you’ll believe you need trillions of dollars in investment. If protons can prove that AI doesn’t need to be the “anti-side of privacy”, as Maguire believes, this may also be enough to call Lumo a success.
