The privacy defenders at Proton have deployed an upgrade to their AI assistant, Lumo, that promises faster and more intelligent responses.
AI assistants can be incredibly useful for drafting emails, planning a trip, or just satisfying a random curiosity, but there’s always that nagging feeling that every question you ask, every idea you explore, is being logged, analysed, and fed back into a massive corporate machine. You’re constantly trading a bit of your privacy for a bit of convenience.
Lumo is now a whole lot smarter. Proton is calling it version 1.1, and the main takeaway is the AI assistant is better at pretty much everything. It’s faster, it gives more detailed answers, and it’s much more up-to-date on what’s happening in the world.
For specific metrics, Proton is claiming a 200% improvement in Lumo’s ability to ‘reason’ through complex problems—you know, the tricky multi-step stuff where other AIs tend to get lost. On top of that, Proton says their AI assistant is now 170% better at actually understanding the context of what you’re asking, and for the coders out there, it’s seen a 40% boost in generating correct code.
But here’s the part that really matters: it does all of this without snooping on you.
Unlike the big players, Proton’s entire approach to AI is built around privacy. When you chat with most AIs, you’re essentially having a conversation in a room full of people taking notes. With Lumo, you’re in a locked room, and only you have the key. Your conversations are encrypted in such a way that nobody at Proton can ever read them. They don’t save your chats, and they don’t use your personal conversations to train their AI.
To prove their privacy claims, Proton has made the code for their AI assistant’s mobile apps open-source. That means Proton is letting anyone look under the bonnet to check that Lumo’s engine is running the way they claim it is. It’s about building trust, not just demanding it.
So, what’s the catch? Well, to get the absolute best performance and unlimited use, you’re encouraged to sign up for Lumo Plus. And that, right there, is the point. Proton is betting that some of us would rather pay a few quid for a service that respects our privacy than get a “free” service where our data is the real price of admission.
This latest update to Lumo is a statement from Proton arguing that you shouldn’t have to choose between a powerful AI and one that respects your privacy. They’re still the underdog fighting the tech giants, but with this update, they’ve shown they’re a contender worth watching.
See also: Why security chiefs demand urgent regulation of AI like DeepSeek
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