Proton CEO Andy Yen projects a calm persona and rails against Big Tech and critiques AI. Internally, he is pushing engineers to build Proton with AI, even when they have security concerns.

A case study in CEO AI psychosis.

Some choice quotes:

In a Slack channel dedicated to thanking people for their work, Yen jumped in. “Get it fixed,” he wrote, referring to Proton’s Reddit post announcing the feature. “Now Reddit is pissed and we look worse than Tuta,” he added, referring to a Proton competitor. When employees explained to Yen the nuances of the encryption and why that was not immediately possible, Yen wrote, “I find this whole thing stupid. You cannot announce this in this way.”

another employee pushed Yen for specifics on ensuring that AI-generated code was free of security issues. “AI won’t magically solve our problems, because security is low in our prioritization at present,” the engineer said. Yen didn’t respond directly, and went on to insult one of the other employees in front of the entire channel. The employee “is saying his usual bs of we can do it but we will be even slower than we are today and I’m saying only losers think like that,” Yen wrote, adding that workers should prompt “better.”

Initially, using AI was banned inside Proton, but the company has since approved AI for all sorts of use cases internally, including processing financial data, drafting customer-facing responses on Reddit and LinkedIn, and writing code […] Ninety percent of code at Proton in October was written by AI, the company’s CTO Bart Butler said in a meeting, according to audio 404 Media obtained. Much of that code is written with Anthropic’s Claude, multiple employees told 404 Media. And Yen tells employees in Slack chats to use Claude, too.

  • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    71·
    3 days ago

    Perhaps it’s time to emotionally divest from FOSS. For most people who lack the technical skills to contribute to AI-free projects, I think this is a “quietly step away from FOSS and pick up other hobbies or go touch grass until this whole LLM craze blows over if it hasn’t caused irreparable harm to FOSS” moment. Otherwise, it’s going to be repeated cycles of jumping onto the next thing that’s AI-free only to realize they changed their minds or they were never truly AI-free. I think at this point, at long as you’re not using proprietary software and aren’t using FOSS with maintainers suffering from AI psychosis, it should be good enough.