xAI to pay telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat app

Exactly. Which do people think users will be more accepting of: “we sold all your data and chats for 300 million” or “we got paid 300 million to integrate AI”.

This is a data sale, pure and simple. xAI certainly isn’t making their money off their LLM/inference. OpenRouter shows Grok at about a billion tokens a day while the top 20 account for 2.5 trillion per day.

I’ve suspected Elon expanded his failing strategy to include data brokering when he saw the opportunity to get access to everyone’s data via Doge. Hence the reason Elon is ready to step away now that Doge (many of which are xAI employees) has finished gaining access to the data from every government system. Quietly offering access to corporate and political clients to query the data of every single person via Grok seems like an easy way to generate some revenue when no one wants your AI.

Exactly, but what users want is not part of this equation.

Google pays apple to be their default search. Do you believe apple users don’t want google to be their default search?

Maybe xAI has some interesting way to make money in other places, like Google paying Mozilla for making Google search the default choice.

A pretty clear admission that Twitter failed as a distribution channel.

> If this is something their users actually wanted

Users wouldn't specifically ask for Grok, but they might like to have access to an AI assistant. When you are competing against OpenAI etc. it makes sense to incentivise big, PR generating customers such as Telegram.

If it turns out to be something actually useful, everyone else will start doing it for $0.

I thought that. Then, I remembered PayPal straight up paying people to use their platform. We saw how that worked out.

So, the question is whether they should pay to generate demand in a new market. Then, who to pay and how much?

I'll also note that OpenAI took the market by offering an expensive service for free (ChatGPT). Then, they offered a monthly plan that may or may not have been profitable. One could argue that OpenAI has been paying people to use its service for a long time.

I also wonder if xAI gets something out of it. For instance, they might get all the conversations with the AI. I believe ChatGPT similarly put free, user conversations to use internally in ways that boosted their paid apps. xAI might have some plays like that.

It’s his play to be an even more important part of the military industrial complex and the surveillance state.

He already has rockets, internet satellites, social platforms, he has the ears of the president and now he will probably have a backdoor to one of the most popular “encrypted” chat apps.

I imagine Telegram-based training data will bias Grok to reflect Musk's own views more reliably than any other platform out there.

> Telegram also has a large amount of users in countries with heavy censorship and surveillance

That citizens of those countries are allowed to use Telegram says something about the privacy it affords to them.

Unfortunately it's also the most sleek and feature-rich messenger of them all :(

[flagged]

And Pavel Durov responded:

> True. Agreed in principle, but formalities are pending.

This is how I know I'm not cut out for business - because I just can't lie with total impunity. Like, how could you do a global, public announcement like this when there is no dry ink, and the other side obviously hasn't authorized you to announce, and feel literally zero shame ("formalities are pending", lol).

I feel like more and more one of the biggest requirements for success in business (not to mention politics) is just total shamelessness.

For as much shit as I give Elon for Twitter and everything else, at least he's a non-stop source of entertainment.

> Call me stupid, but I fundamentally do not grasp why xAI would pay Telegram for access to its users.

Perfectly valid question.

IMO, because xAI is the junior partner in this relationship.

Telegram is bigger and more important than X.

Unlike the 45 billion self-purchase price xAI paid for X, the realistic value for X is, what, 9 billion? I've heard Telegram is estimated to be in the 30-40 billion range: https://web.archive.org/web/20210323132059/https://techcrunc...

When OpenAI bought Windsurf a lot of the discussion was about which market and which customers they hope to get access to by that acquisition. This deal gives xAI privileged distribution among nearly a billion of users (and potentially future customers) for a magnitude less of money.

Who will „win“ the LLM-AI race is as much undecided as is the common way to interact with them and this seems like quite a sensible bet on distribution for a huge userbase with a very specific integration into a platform. Doesn’t seem at all crazy to me.

Nothing is more valuable for an AI company than exclusive access to large amounts of human-generated data.

oh, cause telegram is not a chat app, it's Facebook of eastern Europe

    - Data to train on
    - Being the first GenAI experience of users that then might associate this stuff with xAi branding.

Seems fairly obvious that Musk's strategy is to monetize political influence, isn't it? It's just advertising but a leap darker

$300M is peanuts when it comes to pumping fake valuations of AI companies. Elmo will now boast about 1.4 billion active xai users. He might even claim those are paid users, because he paid them to use his ai :D

Chat app with 1B+ users

I have a premium account as I really like the idea of just paying for the service I use.

I highly assume that the AI will be integrated in a way that you can mostly disable it or barely notice it if you aren't looking for it, like all the other paid or special features.

So many people never noticed stars, NFTS, a whole nft market, pay for messages, pay for groups, ... While using it ever day

I had my doubts before, but this was the proverbial drop in the bucket: I removed my account. People can still contact me via phone, sms, email, or Signal, or by just ringing at the door.

Telegram made $500M profit at ~1.3B revenue.

Revenue comes from ads and premium users and some minor sources.

It looks like Telegram sold the US government a back door to users' messages.

"if it's free, then you are the product" applies here.

Can you elaborate on that? How can xAI integration into telegram incite pogroms?

Reference to:

* https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ceqjq11202ro (xAI bought Twitter)

* https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/01/elon-musk... (Tesla bought solarcity)

Effectively, of course, Twitter and Solarcity went bankrupt. That's what really happened.

I hope the CxO's at companies realize this, and so realize that Musk's big plan for Twitter ("just fire everyone, keep collecting the income") had a slightly different outcome when put into practice: fire everyone, rehire half, get publicly shamed by important people refusing to go back, bankruptcy in 2 years, 5 months. In other words, since 2022 Musk lost 5 million per day, on average, for 2.5 years.

Let that sink in!

Given Tesla’s current prospects it seems more likely that xAI or SpaceX wind up bailing it out.

I'm thinking about most of my communications on Telegram and it's kind of hilarious to imagine it suddenly starting to reply to people on Xitter with unsolicited horny furry roleplay instead of unsolicited white supremacist rants.

Not so hilarious that it doesn't make me want to consider trying to convince all my circles to move to a community-run Matrix server or something though.

Yeah, sounds like they finally accepted that tweets don't make LLM smarter, only less biased, and so they're doubling down to feed more tweet-like data to make it smart and biased.

Why wouldn't you automatically assume this is the case?

Looks like we're at the point where it's both convenient and useful to destroy and recreate entirely new digital identities every few months.

The only cheap way out for users is to generate noise. Clog up their systems with useless data.

Did you have an expectation of privacy using Telegram? I think that's the real issue here. If you were paying for Telegram, then I would say yes, those conversation should not be handed over to xAI. But, if you were ostensibly not paying for it, then I think it should be assumed that use of the service is considered consent to take that and use it as they please.

So yeah, it's almost certain that everything you ever put into Telegram is in Grok.

No I am sure the fine and morally upstanding leadership of xAI are paying $300M just for the fun of it.

Seeing that telegram is clear text by default, you should consider alternatives that offer end to end encryption by default.

As someone that has friends on every chat platform out there, I must say that Telegram is the most polished chat app in existence. Everything just works. I notice bugs in WhatsApp all the time, but hardly ever with Tg. Even stuff like video chat and video messages has always been reliable and fast. As a developer, the API is amazing... in 30min you can make a bot and publish it. The real shame is two fold: chats are not encrypted by default and there's so. much. bot spam on the platform. These two problems have made it my least favorite platform, even though the usage experience is the best.

Because it's the only social network that mixes blogging/feeds (channels) with anonymous chats and public groups. Most other messengers require your phone number to be exposed (although WhatsApp has been fixing it lately).

You can change that in Settings → Privacy and security → Invitations → Select My contacts