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TL;DR: Proton lately launched Lumo, a brand new chatbot service designed with a give attention to confidentiality and safety. Billed as a “privacy-first” AI device, Lumo goals to ship the advantages of contemporary synthetic intelligence with out compromising consumer privateness or misusing private knowledge. Whereas outcomes could range, Proton seems assured sufficient to place Lumo alongside established opponents within the AI market.
The concept behind Lumo is that whereas AI can present significant opportunities for customers and companies, it additionally introduces new dangers associated to private knowledge assortment. In response to Proton, Huge Tech is leveraging AI to speed up the surveillance-capitalism enterprise mannequin rooted in promoting. Companies are actually harvesting huge quantities of consumer knowledge, usually with out clearly looking for consent.
Lumo goals to ship the advantages of AI with out demanding entry to private knowledge. Like different chatbots, it might probably summarize delicate authorized paperwork, reply non-public well being questions, or rewrite private emails. Nonetheless, Lumo incorporates a variety of safeguards particularly designed to guard consumer privateness.
Lumo shops no chat logs, would not share any knowledge with third-party distributors or authorities companies, and would not exploit consumer info to coach new AI fashions. The chatbot can also be protected by zero-access encryption, an open-source expertise designed to forestall third events from accessing customers’ content material.
Lumo is constructed on a number of open-source AI fashions, together with European initiatives developed by Mistral. Proton emphasizes that these fashions are operated from its European knowledge facilities, which ought to improve transparency and cut back the danger of abuse by US or Chinese language AI firms. The Geneva-based firm compares Lumo to providers like Gemini, Copilot, and different industrial AI instruments, which it claims are targeted on turning customers into sources of revenue.
Lumo additionally features a few productivity-focused options, permitting customers to add recordsdata or search the net. The search characteristic is disabled by default and is constructed round privacy-friendly engines. Lumo is obtainable without spending a dime to each visitors utilizing the net model and customers of the official Android or iOS apps. A $13-per-month subscription can also be supplied, unlocking extra capabilities reminiscent of limitless chats, prolonged encrypted chat historical past, and extra.
We tried stress-testing Lumo with some controversial subjects and located that the chatbot is probably going designed to keep away from such interactions. This means that whereas Proton’s service could shield your privateness, it nonetheless enforces content material restrictions just like these of extra conventional chatbots.
