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.

Andy Yen, the CEO of Proton, had a message for an employee in the company’s security Slack channel who urged the company to at least take a few days to pentest newly written code before pushing it live. “That’s bullshit and loser thinking. Of course it’s possible to be fast and secure,” Yen wrote in the channel at the end of August. “Stop thinking always of how to be slower, and focus more on how to be faster.”

In a follow-up message, Yen reiterated his point: “only losers think like that.” His ultimate message for the team was to “stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more.”

  • excursion22@piefed.caOPEnglish
    11·
    2 days ago

    Odd. I was able to read the whole thing initially, but I also now see the paywall.

    Either way, 404media is a fairly reputable journalistic outlet. The article also included CTO Bart Butler’s AI Manifesto, which corroborate the employees’ comments. I don’t see any reason to believe the reporting here is false, especially after the release of Proton’s AI re-interview email earlier this week.

    • XLE@piefed.socialEnglish
      3·
      2 days ago

      FWIW I recognize this account and I have the feeling it will find a lot of excuses to refuse to engage with the content of the article, so it is likely a lost cause.

      From before things really hit the fan they had a slightly different excuse:

      I’m aware that a link is attached which bypasses this restriction, but if I have to break the law to read the article or alternatively hand over my personal data, then I think it shouldn’t have been shared here in the first place.