Proton Unveils Lumo: A Privacy-Focused AI Assistant for Secure Communication

The company behind the encrypted email service Proton Mail, Proton, has launched a privacy-focused AI assistant named Lumo.

This new chatbot is capable of analyzing documents, generating code, composing emails, and performing a variety of other tasks. Notably, user data is stored locally on their devices.

To safeguard user information, Proton employs zero-access encryption. Users are provided with a key that allows them to view their data, ensuring that third parties, including the company itself, cannot access personal information.

This approach guarantees that Proton cannot share user information with advertisers or governments, nor can they use it to train large language models, as stated by the firm.

Lumo includes an internet search feature, but it is disabled by default to ensure «maximum privacy.» If users choose to activate it, the chatbot will only search through privacy-respecting search engines.

Proton markets this chatbot as an alternative to solutions offered by major AI companies like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Meta AI, Google’s Gemini, and Microsoft’s Copilot.

«Big Tech uses AI to enhance the collection of sensitive user data and accelerate the shift towards a surveillance capitalism,» said Proton’s CEO and founder Andy Yen. «Our vision is for artificial intelligence to prioritize people over profit.»

Lumo operates on several open-source language models hosted on the company’s servers in Europe, including Nemo from Mistral, Mistral Small 3, OpenHands 32B from Nvidia, and OLMO 2 32B from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

The chatbot selects different processing solutions based on which model is best suited for a specific task. For instance, OpenHands handles programming-related inquiries.

Additionally, it’s worth noting that in October 2024, Google integrated the Gemini chatbot into its Gmail app for iOS.