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

https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/28/xai-to-invest-300m-in-telegram-integrate-grok-into-app/

by freetonik • 1 year ago

322 360 1 year ago

bognition2• 1 year ago

I can't help but think this means that all my telegram conversations will now be fed into grok. I'm curious how I'd go about verifying that this is or isn't going to be the case.

mlinhares• 1 year ago

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

yladiz• 1 year ago

I wouldn’t trust X or Elon Musk, and $300M is the kind of money that you can ask for a lot of things from the recipient.

herbst5• 1 year ago

Because it's expensive and telegram already is bot traffic to a large portion (channels, bots, ...) that would be completely useless for training.

mdhb• 1 year ago

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

egypturnash• 1 year ago

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.

alphager• 1 year ago

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

harg• 1 year ago

It's not clear text by default, it's just not end-to-end encrypted. Messages are still encrypted between client and server.

I agree about considering alternatives though.

paxys• 1 year ago

End-to-end encryption isn't going to help if the chatbot/data harvester is embedded in the app itself.

numpad0• 1 year ago

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.

Molitor5901• 1 year ago

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.

dgellow4• 1 year ago

That’s not at all how consent works

timewizard• 1 year ago

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.

afavour4• 1 year ago

Feels oh so telling that xAI has to pay Telegram and not the other way around. If these offerings were so great wouldn't we all be clamoring for it?

fallingknife• 1 year ago

Doesn't feel much different than Google paying for being the default in browsers

toomuchtodo• 1 year ago

No different. It is an attempt to prime the pump to stoke valuations. The product is the stock price go up, the illusion of value creation is the work. "Please Use."

If people aren't paying for it, and you have to pay them to use it, what is the value? Russ Hanneman Silicon Valley pre revenue rant meme here

swyx• 1 year ago

i get what youre saying but there are impt differences:

1) search is much cheaper to serve than chat

2) chat is a less frequent usecase

3) google paid for entry into a locked ecosystem (apple. also to appear like they are not a monopoly). telegram is far from locked.

bognition2• 1 year ago

Models are only as good as the data that is fed into them. OpenAI is paying Reddit 70M for access to the data. So the real value here is the conversations, not the model.

And in the case of Telegram, you will get very intimate data about people. You know in real time who they are talking to, what they are talking about, etc... Its extremely valuable data

jermaustin1• 1 year ago

I think this is more the case. xAI is looking for more data to ingest.

I'm not sure how the integration will work with Telegram if the contents are supposed to be "secure". Are you just allowing your conversation to get exfiltrated to xAI? Does the other party you are talking to get a say in that?

jpalomaki• 1 year ago

In certain countries Telegram channels also seem to be a very popular news source.

Just with access to the feeds from X, Grok is already sometimes quite handy for checking some latest developments.

jsheard• 1 year ago

It's the next logical step after companies shoving AI into every corner of their own products regardless of whether their users want it - now they're paying other companies to shove AI things into their products regardless of whether their users want it. Genuine user interest doesn't come close to justifying their insane valuations so they have to put their thumb on the scale by shoving it everyones face and then pretending that's the same thing.

See also: Googles AI summaries, which always get top billing so they can tally nearly every search up as an "AI engagement" regardless of user intent, and can't be disabled because that would get in the way of what's clearly the actual goal (to juice the AI metrics as hard as possible, user experience be damned).

FirmwareBurner• 1 year ago

Googles AI summaries, which are pinned to the top of results and can't be disabled

You CAN disable them. Append -ai to your Google search query. You're welcome.

Edit: curious why are people downvoting a helpful workaround?

fhd22• 1 year ago

Well, there's -ai for Google.

I do take some grim satisfaction from having Google pay for inference and then ignoring it though.

enceladus06• 1 year ago

Just like the Google+ days.

babypuncher• 1 year ago

The corporate world is overrun with executives designing products that look like solutions to other executives but that don't solve any problems problems people in the real world actually have.

It is funny seing xAI, the trash-tier AI company, integrate with Telegram, the trash-tier messaging service.

luma2• 1 year ago

xAI has essentially zero market outside of twitter, and with recent system prompt shenanigans from Elon, I cannot imagine anyone signing up to pay for API hits when there's a non-zero chance your application will suddenly start complaining about white genocide. They're painted themselves into a corner with the product and Elon's increasingly erratic behavior, they now have to pay companies to use their service.

bobxmax4• 1 year ago

We've seen multiple companies in the last twelve months blast past any past benchmark of fastest growing company ever. It's become pedestrian for some of these companies to scale to $10m ARR in a quarter which has never happened before.

"Genuine user interest doesn't come close to justifying their insane valuations" - classic HN copium

ryandrake2• 1 year ago

It's absolutely wild and scary watching how much money is being spent on pushing AI down the unwilling public's throats. Nobody wants this. Yet we're hiring expensive AI researchers and developers, buying datacenters full of GPUs, and now paying "partner" companies, to deliver this thing that nobody is asking for. What in the world is going on here? What am I not understanding?

seanhunter• 1 year ago

Example: Since this deal was cash + equity I wondered whether telegram has a public valuation. I searched google and got an AI summary saying that the market capitalization of TELEGRAM is $7.4767.

That's dollars not billion dollars, because google's AI summary was referring to some scam coin which has a total marketcap of a big mac and fries plus or minus. It seems now to have updated to refer to the messaging app and _their_ (probably also scam)coin.

pjc50• 1 year ago

Time for some no-evidence conspiracy theory: the API-based "AI"s are surveillance vectors, so this is just cover for running all your conversations through a tool to determine which ones to report to which authorities.

(while in theory they can be run locally, in practice this is rare)

linkage• 1 year ago

No matter how good your offering is, you always need marketing if you are competing against an established behemoth in the space like OpenAI. Even Google has been unable to make much of a dent in OpenAI's daily active users despite having superior distribution and (recently) comparable quality.

Grok 3 is legitimately one of the best general purpose models out there. People don't know about it because ChatGPT is "good enough". And people have no reason to care unless Grok 3 is 5x better or ships a feature that goes viral like Ghibli portraits.

afavour4• 1 year ago

$300m could buy you a hell of a lot of marketing, no? Then people could choose to use your product rather than be forced to.

We’re side stepping the elephant in the room: X/xAI/Musk’s brand is toxic and forcing the product onto users is one of few paths available.

reverendsteveii• 1 year ago

I honestly don't care about the technical capabilities of the tool when I know it's being actively mismanaged.

Incidentally, have you got a moment to talk about the white genocide in south africa?

oblio• 1 year ago

Don't bet against Google. Their cloud is growing despite coming from 4th or 5th place, now it's on 3rd place and growing faster than AWS and if I recall correctly, faster than even Azure.

And Google basically invented LLM tech.

saubeidl4• 1 year ago

Grok3 could be leagues ahead of anything else in the game and yet a large portion of the western population would never use it due to its owners antics.

Spooky232• 1 year ago

It’s pretty good. I think it seems better especially early on because the guardrails aren’t as stringent.

ChatGPT is really wussified. I tried to edit a fence from a picture of my son hitting a baseball and it was flagged as violent content.

From a business context, i wouldn’t put my customers data anywhere near grok.

theijcfj47744l• 1 year ago

This is mostly a HCI problem - Google's AI interface for eg. is horrible, but Perplexity is a joy to use.

Hikikomori• 1 year ago

Tech fascists have the best ai, great.

bastardoperator• 1 year ago

This type of legalized data exfiltration doesn't come cheap.

apercu• 1 year ago

Completely agree, but another way to look at it is that Elmo is using someone else's money anyway...

98codes• 1 year ago

AI models being "sold" into apps is the new version of Google paying to be the default search in web browsers.

Main difference now is that the worst version is the only one being sold.

asadotzler3• 1 year ago

Main difference is Google was paying a rev share, so both parties make bank off the deal, mostly Google. Here, there is no shared interest, just one company taking money from another for distribution with no financial return. Neither company has any incentive to make it work well.

mylons• 1 year ago

it's quite possible many model producers are trying to do this with telegram, and therefore there is a price for exclusivity?

msgodel• 1 year ago

Language models should all converge to something that's more or less identical. They're commodities.

The hype bubble might mean they're commodities with a negative price for a little while.

huevosabio• 1 year ago

Depends on the monetization strategy.

Google pays Apple a ton to be the search engine.

But yea, if xAI isn't going for ads, this is a pretty bad sign.

smeeth2• 1 year ago

I don't like Grok that much, but there's nothing particularly new or interesting about this deal. Telegram has a big international audience, it makes sense someone would pay to be the default for user adoption reasons.

"Feels oh so telling that Google has to pay Apple and not the other way around. If Google search was so great wouldn't we all be clamoring for it to be the default search in Safari?"

croes• 1 year ago

Google does it to hinder competition, so it is telling.

nemomarx• 1 year ago

people go out of their way to install chrome but don't go out of their way to change away from Bing search as much, su that seems correct to me.

rurp• 1 year ago

The Google Search deal seems like a much more defensible business decision to me for a couple reasons. For starters Google gets revenue almost every single time that search integration is used so there is a direct return on the investment. What's the conversion rate for a paid Grok account? It might turn out to be terribly low and $300M is a substantial amount of money. I doubt a normal company without Elon's vast wealth network that needs to actually make money would gamble on a deal like this.

The other reason is that the Apple deal is a big part of maintaining Google's search monopoly. Owning a tech monopoly is vastly more valuable than competing in a crowded market so locking down market share to achieve that can be worth spending more per user than their median value. Grok isn't even in the ballpark of an LLM monopoly so those benefits don't apply in their case.

Tycho2• 1 year ago

Same as OpenAI paying Apple to integrate ChatGPT with Siri/iPhone.

Apple has the users. As does Telegram. Of course, non-paying users are a loss-leader, but some portion of them will convert to premium users.

They’re paying for distribution. And maybe mindshare.

Handy-Man• 1 year ago

OpenAI is not paying Apple though. Only money exchange that happens is the cut Apple takes of the subscriptions.

MaxPock• 1 year ago

Or Google paying Apple 20 billion dollars to be the default search engine in Apple devices

dmix• 1 year ago

How is it different than Google paying Firefox?

hirako2000• 1 year ago

That's different as X is buying a form of exclusivity there.

Paying a browser to become the default search engine is just to serve first. And, there is the argument users are not asking for, nor want Ai features, I bet most don't want it. They just want to chat, with humans that is.

They are inserting Ai everywhere they can, not to rank up their product as the kind of product people are looking for, against those of the competitors.

A browser without a default search engine is a downgrade for everyone. Although it would be more ethical if it simply prompted for which to default to. One could point at it and see an issue, but that's pretty different.

nitwit005• 1 year ago

Most users would probably use Google by default if forced to pick on install. Google is effectively paying so that their competitors like Microsoft won't sign their own deal and become the default Firefox search instead.

xyst• 1 year ago

It’s training data. That’s all that Felon wants.

moralestapia2• 1 year ago

Flawed logic.

Google pays Mozilla for a spot in Firefox.

asadotzler3• 1 year ago

Google pays Mozilla a fraction of the money Goggle makes from ad clicks driven by Firefox, a revenue sharing agreement. Where's xAI's 80:20 split here? Where's the default AI interface in Telegram that users would fill with some other AI service if Telegram wasn't getting paid for the distribution? Where's the user expectation of AI in the product in the first place.

This is nothing like the Google Mozilla (or Googlge Apple or Google whoever) deal.

aresant• 1 year ago

Not sure that's the right way to look at it

Premium Telegram users get to try for free, will move to a subscription model

Telegram has 12m premium users up from 4m in 2023, and 1b+ users

Not unreasonable to think a 5% take rate from just premium users at say $10/month extra

Which - at 50% revenue share to GROK - would be a ~$36m a year run rate for Grok

At $36m in this category of AI SaaS that's something like $400 - 500m in enterprise value out of the box

antisthenes• 1 year ago

I think this deal is more xAI buying advertising for Grok in Telegram.

johnfn• 1 year ago

Google paid Mozilla XB to keep Google as the default search engine, and Apple XXB. Does that mean that Google wasn't a good product?

mrguyorama• 1 year ago

Google didn't have to pay anyone back in 1999 or early 2000s.

Google paying Mozilla and Apple to be the "standard" search engine absolutely means it is a bad product. IMO it's purely anticompetitive too, but I'm a competitive market radical.

I feel similarly for how chrome didn't win by being "good", it won by being bundled, and by putting one click "Hey hey click here" buttons on google.com.

dughnut• 1 year ago

Yes

abletonlive5• 1 year ago

Please tell us what you believe this is telling us. You’ve left it up to interpretation and this feels more like a Reddit quality comment than one that the hackernews community deserves.

In my opinion, it’s telling us that competition in the LLM space is accelerating and it’s anybody’s game right now. It’s important enough of a space that companies are willing to pay for exposure and squeeze out the competition.

I’ve interpreted your comment as “llm has no value so the providers are paying for people to use it”, which is, naive at best

sefrost• 1 year ago

That's an interesting way of looking at it thanks for sharing. In that way it's similar to Google paying to be the default search engine in Firefox or on iOS. They _did_ have the best search engine at the time but they still paid platforms to have it embedded as a default option.

diggan• 1 year ago

“llm has no value so the providers are paying for people to use it”,

I feel like for that to have been even possible to understand from that comment, then "not the other way around" couldn't have been there. If authors opinion was that LLMs has no value, why'd Telegram pay to use Grok?

Maybe I'm just used to reading between the lines, but I think parents comment strike a fine balance between saying too much, saying enough and saying too little. It's understandable what they mean, if you read the full comment. Not everything has to be explicitly spelled out for the lowest common denominator.

sidcool3• 1 year ago

It's like Google paying Apple. Doesn't mean Google is bad, just means it needs the traffic and Apple has the reach.

asadotzler3• 1 year ago

Google pays a rev share on the return it gets from the deal. This isn't pay and cross your fingers child's play here. Google makes most of the money for search transactions that click ads and the distributor, Apple, makes a small fraction of that for providing the search access points. Where's xAI's lucrative return here? Where's their 80:20 split?

bobxmax4• 1 year ago

Or, y'know, there's a lot of AI vendors and Telegram doesn't need to pay for it because they have something to offer.

Hacker news users will consistently use the dumbest arguments to try and poo-poo AI.

amadeuspagel• 1 year ago

xAI will pay $300 million in cash and equity to the chat app as part of the deal, Telegram’s CEO Pavel Durov said on Tuesday.

So what's the valuation for that equity?

explain• 1 year ago

This makes Telegram a very minor owner of X.

culebron212• 1 year ago

Well, as a 9-year user of Telegram, I expected some monetization and paid mode, but looks like we're going to be used otherwise, for more free cheese.

miohtama3• 1 year ago

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

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

herbst5• 1 year ago

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

tgv• 1 year ago

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.

jug• 1 year ago

Given the shady stuff there, sounds like a match made in heaven to be honest, haha...

anonzzzies• 1 year ago

As I said before here recently; I am replacing all my tooling by stuff I built and that includes chat. I own my company so my colleagues can leave or use it too (they help me build so yes, they will use) and family will come on board if they have a side access to people who won't, which we do: we integrate other chats and for those we losen the rules. I have no interest, when I die in 40 years, to depend on even one line of software not inspected by me.

iamtheworstdev• 1 year ago

the good news is that when this doesn't yield any positive results for xAI and they need a bailout then they'll get bought by Tesla, and Elon is saved once again.

spwa42• 1 year ago

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!

fundad3• 1 year ago

It wasn't about revenue, it was about a massive propaganda and surveillance apparatus.

JumpCrisscross2• 1 year ago

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

h2782• 1 year ago

This is a self-comforting argument I keep seeing all over against Tesla. Yet, their refreshed models are showing up on roads very quickly.

Demand for Tesla isn't permanently going anywhere just to make a few new Elon haters happy. I also don't like Musk, but I am not deluding myself like so many these days that Tesla is dead. Elon is much like a roach; he will survive nuclear Armageddon.

rendang• 1 year ago

Market seems to think pretty highly of Tesla's prospects given the 1T+ market cap

declan_roberts• 1 year ago

Now xAI is fully plugged into the zeitgeist.

Integration into telegram chats seems like a natural extension to the data xAI gets from Twitter.

$40 billion for twitter is a steal in retrospect now that we've entered an era of insatiable appetite for training data.

overfeed7• 1 year ago

$40 billion for twitter is a steal

How so, when they could have paid around $300M for the data?

Telegram may even be more valuable in terms of conversations, because Twitter data has very low signal:noise ratio - such as replies whose entirity are 3-word sentences or just emojis

cosmicgadget2• 1 year ago

I don't know about you but many of my messages are 1-3 emojis. Not that it matters, that is an easy thing to filter out of training data.

Elon's election-buying effort was certainly assisted by the Twitter purchase. And look how few (formerly) blue checks have left the platform despite his antics.

ARandumGuy• 1 year ago

Is this the same Grok that started inserting talking points about "white genocide in South Africa" on completely unrelated queries? Even if you wanted some AI chatbot integrated with your chat app (which I personally don't), it feels like Grok is the worst one you could pick.

nosioptar• 1 year ago

Wouldn't bullshit white power rants fit right in on telegram?

bibinou• 1 year ago

@grok: is this true?

bgwalter• 1 year ago

Given the use in conflict zones and the prevalence of military bloggers from all sides, Telegram is already one of the most surveilled apps out there.

Grok relaying your queries to certain agencies won't add much, but it will be interesting to see what bias Grok will exhibit on Telegram.

serial_dev2• 1 year ago

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.

rodgerd• 1 year ago

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

retornam4• 1 year ago

Telegram is a haven for scammers and malware authors, who frequently use it as a command and control channel. These scammers and malware authors can now seamlessly integrate Grok into their tools.

Congrats everyone.

arresin• 1 year ago

Whatsapp and signal may even be more pearl clutchable as they have end to end encryption and in signal’s case I believe it’s audited.

retornam4• 1 year ago

It is worth noting that WhatsApp Trust and Safety team is more effective in removing and blocking large-scale scam operations compared to Telegram.

For instance, Telegram’s founder was recently arrested in France for failing to adequately remove malware, scam, and CSAM from the platform. It was only after his arrest that Telegram began to take moderation seriously, although their efforts remain woefully inadequate.

northzen2• 1 year ago

Still better and more feature rich than WA.

retornam4• 1 year ago

Indeed, it is undoubtedly advantageous for scammers and malware authors.

transcriptase• 1 year ago

Wait until you find out about IRC!

retornam4• 1 year ago

When was the last time you ran into an IRC CnC server?

drivingmenuts2• 1 year ago

What is the alternative? Discord is just a PITA to use. I need to suggest something to a group of people that have been meeting online since 2007 (it's a small group with widely varying technical abilities/time).

cheema332• 1 year ago

What is the alternative?

WhatsApp is better even if you don't like Zuckerberg. I may not trust Zuck, but I trust a Russian dude and Musk a lot less.

jazzyjackson3• 1 year ago

Just painted a target on Telegrams back as a channel to feed misinformation into Grok

game_the0ry2• 1 year ago

Call me stupid, but I fundamentally do not grasp why xAI would pay Telegram for access to its users. $300M seems like a crazy amount of money to put into a chat app.

I am genuinely curious about the business strategy behind the move bc that would be a market worth exploring - having something that the AI industry would pay for bc they are willing to spend a lot right now.

z3dd• 1 year ago

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

game_the0ry2• 1 year ago

And how is the data of Eastern Europe as valuable as xAI is paying for it?

bearjaws• 1 year ago

Used pretty heavily by island nations and LATAM.

anbr• 1 year ago

intelligence gathering

verdverm• 1 year ago

thought policing and influencing

The value is in manipulation, not monies

arizen• 1 year ago

Chat app with 1B+ users

ben_w2• 1 year ago

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...

pier252• 1 year ago

TIL Telegram has like 1 billion users.

cowpig• 1 year ago

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

top_sigrid• 1 year ago

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.

didibus• 1 year ago

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

beAbU2• 1 year ago

Not sure I buy your second bullet.

Windows has had copilot baked in for a while now, where genai stuff is already possible.

Meta has their ai baked into WhatsApp, and probably into instagram as well (not sure though)

Google is rolling out gemini on android.

I would posit that for a majority of telegram users, xAi is just going to be "yet another AI integration" for them, and it'll be nothing novel.

felipeerias• 1 year ago

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

rasz• 1 year ago

$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

taurath2• 1 year ago

This just made a whole ton of people I know on telegram (furries who make the internets go) immediately accelerate their movement off the platform. I found out about this news because of some backup signal rooms started sending notifications. They need to get ahead of the privacy implications and quickly. Furries are basically the roma of the internet at this point - what they value hasn't changed (anonymity, moderation tooling, rich expression, security) but they move on as platforms betray their original usecases. They're like the canaries for enshittification especially around privacy.

loopdoend2• 1 year ago

Where are they going?

Vilian2• 1 year ago

Signal and matrix probably

taurath2• 1 year ago

Too early to tell - usually they'll settle on something with a balance of those main values. If matrix is truly the new IRC then perhaps that, though it doesn't seem mature enough yet and it seems like it might be costly if one needs to host non-text content. Furries contain both highly technical people and also very low-tech artists so any platform that requires a lot of maintenance can be a non-starter. Signal seems like privacy over expression. Maybe this is the time that they'll make their own.

culebron212• 1 year ago

Confirming. Discussed this in many chats today.

herbst5• 1 year ago

Not a furry but before anything happens I guess we need to wait how telegram is actually going to implement it. The way it got presented, basically as additional add-on not getting in your way for normal telegram business at all I doubt it will matter.

_ink_• 1 year ago

That might be finally a reason for my friends to leave that app.

Klonoar2• 1 year ago

I spent half an hour dealing with a group I’m in getting off the platform today. Frustratingly, the majority wanted iMessage.

I’d prefer Signal but the story for backups on iOS is still a mess, and nobody wants to deal with it.

starik36• 1 year ago

My god, the level of negativity about absolutely everything is insane.

sMarsIntruder• 1 year ago

Negativity and hate.

kklisura• 1 year ago

Telegram is the most popular messaging app in Iran and Uzbekistan [1]
Telegram’s largest market is India, which accounts for more than 20% of its userbase. Telegram also has a large amount of users in countries with heavy censorship and surveillance, such as Iran, Russia, and Uzbekistan. [1]
Percentage of users via region: Asia 38%, Europe 27%, Latin America 21%, MEMA 8% [1]

It sure is valuable data - if you are a three letter agency. Not sure if it's valuable business data.

[1] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/telegram-statistics/

troupo• 1 year ago

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

drdaeman• 1 year ago

It sort of used to be, although not exactly as a messenger - it was never good for one-to-one private conversations, but as a social network with channels and groups.

However, for the last couple years enshittification is in progress - it's not at Microsoft Teams levels yet, but they're really trying to get there, shoving more and more ads (third- and first-party both) into users' faces with increasing frequency.

acjohnson55• 1 year ago

I agree. I need to migrate off, but I haven't figured out where to yet.

sorokod• 1 year ago

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.

tdiff• 1 year ago

Its well known that whatsapp is also available in Russia

machomaster2• 1 year ago

You don't know what you are talking about. Read on the multi-year attempts of Putin trying to ban Telegram and Telegram fighting back (technologically and also politically - demonstrations, etc). Telegram won the battle and Putin had no choice but to admit defeat.

Similar things happened in other non-free coutries as well.

sidcool3• 1 year ago

Every week, at least once I am added to a spam Telegram group. It was fun earlier, but now it's a nuisance.

lawrencejgd• 1 year ago

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

Suppafly3• 1 year ago

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

Bizarre that that's not the default and that it's actually an option at all.

phillipcarter2• 1 year ago

Sad to say this as a formerly happy user of telegram:

Boy that tracks. The shadiest AI model provider paying the shadiest chat app provider to integrate the racist slop machine into the scam and CSAM distribution machine.

xAI engineers, I genuinely hope you get the bag soon and switch jobs back into a reputable AI lab.

rchaud4• 1 year ago

Out of interest, why were you using telegram to begin with, considering that it's known for being a haven of shady content? Not just hate groups and paramilitaries, but also tons of pirated content? All that content browsed gets linked back to your phone number does it not?

int_19h2• 1 year ago

Not OP, but Telegram is the only popular option with E2EE that has good clients across all desktop and mobile OSes (including Linux), doesn't tie your account to your phone number, and doesn't limit the number of devices which can use the same account.

phillipcarter2• 1 year ago

It was a reasonable messaging app for a lot of folks in ~2013-2016. The stickers support was excellent and it had a lot of excellent features, even though its psuedo-open source stance was always a little weird. I also ascribed some level of trust to Pavel Durov as ultimately being anti-authoritarian given his history with Putin and thought that was ... fine, I guess. Anyways, with the rise of crypto came a lot of other unsavory things where Telegram became the de facto comms platform for criminals. While criminals will use any medium, it's also a matter of critical mass to me.

hintymad2• 1 year ago

So that means Telegram users will use XAI for free, which means it will cost xAI potentially multiple times of $300M a year to serve the Telegram users?

leptons• 1 year ago

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

dist-epoch• 1 year ago

Yes, this is why I switched from free Linux to paid Windows. I don't want to be the product.

npteljes2• 1 year ago

This is a tired, and untrue cliché. Everyone is the product, all the time.

fundad3• 1 year ago

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

herbst5• 1 year ago

Because you assume all messages will be relayed to AI?

DisjointedHunt• 1 year ago

Telegram channels are upstream of ALL text based social media and to an increasing degress, culturally upstream to many content trends as well.

Take the war in Ukraines for example, the uncensored and real time updates you get in open Telegram channels make most intelligence agencies except for Five Eyes nations look regular.

This deal may be much bigger than it seems off the bat. The cohort of people using Telegram to exchange content is maybe the top 5% of the world in many important niches.

Suppafly3• 1 year ago

If this is something their users actually wanted, they'd be paying xAI, not the other way around.

hiddencost• 1 year ago

Like Google with Apple?

eqvinox• 1 year ago

Google pays Apple because Google has paying customers for that in their advertisers.

For xAI to pay Telegram... where does xAI get value back out of that? I guess we'll be seeing AI with ads soon?

hintymad2• 1 year ago

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

zinglersen• 1 year ago

It's the same reason for Google and xAI - they want user data and are more than happy to pay for it.

nikanj• 1 year ago

Google is paying Mozilla to keep Firefox on life support - so that they can pretend Chrome has competitors

Hoasi• 1 year ago

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

splatter9859• 1 year ago

Never usually is with Musk and his platforms. Both X and Tesla's software stack clearly show this readily. He has other purposes in mind.

prettyblocks2• 1 year ago

As a Telegram user, I don't mind having an interface to Grok that is outside of X.

nickpsecurity4• 1 year ago

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.

rchaud4• 1 year ago

When was PayPal doing that? I remember having to create an account 20 years ago because they were the only payment processor option on Ebay, that seemed to be their moat. These days, I use Paypal as a "wallet" that's connected to my CC, to pay for stuff on sites where I don't want to put in my CC information.

bag_boy• 1 year ago

How do you PayPal straight up paying people to use their platform worked out?

Barrin92• 1 year ago

I don't think users really want this for what it's worth, but that's a bad argument. The median (social media) internet user pays exactly zero for anything, so deriving expectations from money is a bit silly. The actual currency to watch is attention. If they don't like it, engagement will drop.

mquander• 1 year ago

That's just not true. If Telegram wanted it a small amount, and xAI wanted it a large amount, it would be normal for Telegram to negotiate to get paid for doing it.

lolinder• 1 year ago

This isn't quite the framing I'd use—the key thing that would make it make sense for the deal to go this way is if there's competition bidding for the slot. Say OpenAI also wants in and was willing to pay for it. Absent competition for the slot and assuming that Telegram actually wanted the deal, we'd expect to see at most a no-cost exchange.

There's no reason for Grok to pay this much for the deal unless either Telegram sees it as a net negative that needs reimbursement or they're competing with other bids.

Gothmog69• 1 year ago

Google pays Apple some 20 billion a year for search primacy on iphones

piyuv• 1 year ago

That shows that their trust in users selecting google as primary if given the option when setting up a new device is not high. Otherwise they’d negotiate it down.

selcuka• 1 year ago

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.

roycebranning• 1 year ago

if users specifically wanted Grok, yes. if they generally want AI, no.

throw05678931• 1 year ago

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

A4ET8a8uTh0_v22• 1 year ago

Or.. an understanding that not all users reside in the same silos.

blitzar• 1 year ago

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

bko• 1 year ago

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

therealpygon2• 1 year ago

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.

outside1234• 1 year ago

And deleting the Telegram app. Will save me time anyway closing spam messages.

l5870uoo9y• 1 year ago

If paying Apple 20 billion to be the default search engine in Safari, paying Telegram 300 million in cash and equity for access to their 1 billion monthly active users, seems like a good deal for xAI. Where else are they gonna get users at that scale?

seydor• 1 year ago

if people don't want to use the AI it means the AI is not useful or interesting enough. paying 300M won't really move the needle in that. Now , if they actually paid the users to use it ... who knows

smileson2• 1 year ago

Interesting!

pseudony• 1 year ago

Oh yes, I was really missing an Apartheid AI. .... Guess its time to switch everyone.

Sueprising they thought thst 300M was enough. I think they seriously underestimate how Musk's name is perceived in the EU, for example.

evan_• 1 year ago

The Facebook-inspired pogroms in Myanmar were a prologue to the horrors that this will incite

baxtr• 1 year ago

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

jonny_eh• 1 year ago

It has been injected with politically motivated bias: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/may/14/elon-musk...

slt2021• 1 year ago

telegram is big in Russia, Ukraine, Iran.

could be used for spying purposes, if xAI can analyze telegram chats and identify texts of interest to the next-get USA military industrial complex (SpaceX, Palantir, Anduril, etc)

miohtama3• 1 year ago

xAI is paying to be "the default" AI of s chat app of 1B monthly active users.

They pay for distribution and they likely believe they can later monetise this by sheer mass, roping people in Grok or offering professional paid services.

Telegram has in-app monetisation for 50 payment providers and more than hundred countries. They also have crypto but it is unrelated.

Also if someone still believes into the freedom of speech, Telegram was just banned in Vietnam this week when they refused bend the knee to the government. It aligns with Musk's ideology.

basgras• 1 year ago

Disagree with that last point. Musk bends his knee regularly and censors his X users, because he has so many business conflicts of interest. https://qz.com/elon-musk-x-twitter-transparency-brazil-turke...

EastSmith2• 1 year ago

"No deal has been signed" per Elon Musk post on X.

EastSmith2• 1 year ago

"No deal has been signed" per Elon Musk's post on X just now.

dawnerd• 1 year ago

If this shows up in my Telegram app I'll be immediately switching. I don't want or need a harmful LLM in my chat app.

animitronix• 1 year ago

If your llm is so unpopular that you have to pay people to use it, you should probably just stop

duskwuff• 1 year ago

The situation just got murkier: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1927839555828220165

("@durov @grok No deal has been signed")

hn_throwaway_992• 1 year ago

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.

meepmorp• 1 year ago

It's not a lie if you (choose to) believe it!

vl2• 1 year ago

He is the CEO of a corporation. Let's assume Pavel and Elon had a phone call and agreed on the deal. One of them or both are entitled to announce it. Pavel Durov announced multiple deals before on his tg channel. Now it is surprising turn of events, it seems they didn't work out details to the degree implied, but calling it lying is a far stretch.

A4ET8a8uTh0_v22• 1 year ago

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

I am going through 'Signal and Noise' by Nate Silver and, after dismissing it at first read, now I am starting to wonder if his attempt to categorize some people on how well they can predict things is onto something. The boorish bravado ( or at least a perception of it ) is clearly part of the requirement though. You simply cannot even register to people with all the noise around them.

dcchambers3• 1 year ago

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

dcchambers3• 1 year ago

The $300M "in cash and xAI equity" could turn out to not be that much money, depending on what percentage of that was equity.

xAI recently raised at an $80B valuation and it's highly debatable if it's actually worth that...and who knows if you'd ever actually have a liquidation event.

fragmede• 1 year ago

How do you want to define liquidation event? SpaceX employees are getting rich despite no IPO in sight.

dcchambers3• 1 year ago

Fair enough. I'm not at all familiar with SpaceX's comp but I assume they do private liquidity events/stock sales for their employees. Who knows if X/xAI will do something similar, and if outside equity holders are subject to those same rules. Far above my pay grade to figure that out.

smrtinsert• 1 year ago

That is absurdly low given that grok probably will be learning from the inputs. If anything this number should be in the billions. Do telegram users even want this? I thought it was privacy focused app.

dgellow4• 1 year ago

I thought it was privacy focused app.

Not really. It’s what people repeat over and over by ignorance, but it is popular because it has the best UX for a messaging app.

Encrypted chats exist but are opt in and nobody is using them.

fennecfoxy3• 1 year ago

As a furry: nooooooooooooooo. Please God, no!

theasisa• 1 year ago

If anything this will make text written by Grok easily identifiable by the constant yiffing

fennecfoxy3• 1 year ago

Contrary to popular belief that's not really so much a thing. Even back in the day RP was only vaguely popular with a portion of the community. Most furries don't have sex in fursuit, only some.

Otherwise it's not yiffing, it's just sex. Probably more prevalent among furries given that we have a higher ratio of queer people than wider society, and we're all mostly more open about sex. Straight non-furs are comparatively Catholic in their relations.

rgavuliak• 1 year ago

Since Grok is too left leaning despite all of Musk's efforts, he needs to get in some more training data that has an alt-right conspiracy bias.

logic_node• 1 year ago

Surprised to see Grok coming to Telegram—if true, this could shake up how we interact with AI inside messaging apps.

Nerd_Nest• 1 year ago

Grok in Telegram? That’s one bold move by xAI. I'm curious to see how users actually engage with it in day-to-day conversations.

JamesAdir• 1 year ago

I don't understand how Telegram is still around. The app has zero support, even for paid users. You can't rely on it, and unlike Meta products, where at least there is someone to escalate to, in Telegram it's nonexistent. My account was taken over by a malicious actor, and I can't get it restored no matter how many emails and DMs on X I've sent them. Zero response

ivm• 1 year ago

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).

jadbox• 1 year ago

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.

dgellow4• 1 year ago

And it has been the most polished chat platform since a decade, they have been just excellent at creating a product people love to use. I really don’t want xAI, so I guess I could switch to WhatsApp, but that would be a downgrade…

dgellow4• 1 year ago

Well, I’ve been a really happy telegram user since at least 2014. If anything from xAI is forced on me I’m out asap.

thewileyone• 1 year ago

Time to delete Telegram

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

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