[HN Gopher] xAI to pay telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the...
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xAI to pay telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat app
Author : freetonik
Score : 246 points
Date : 2025-05-28 15:12 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (techcrunch.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (techcrunch.com)
| bognition wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Why wouldn't you automatically assume this is the case?
| yladiz wrote:
| 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.
| jaoane wrote:
| It's not X or Elon musk that you have to trust with regards
| to the privacy of your telegram conversations.
| rvnx wrote:
| Yes it's some rich Russian dude trading with Elmo.
| mdhb wrote:
| No I am sure the fine and morally upstanding leadership of xAI
| are paying $300M just for the fun of it.
| egypturnash wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Seeing that telegram is clear text by default, you should
| consider alternatives that offer end to end encryption by
| default.
| harg wrote:
| 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.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Ok so theyre plaintext on the server, encrypted in transit
| just means https
| crop_rotation wrote:
| > Messages are still encrypted between client and server.
|
| This is just a clever way of saying they use TLS, which I
| would be shocked if any mainstream app is not using.
| malfist wrote:
| Don't look under the hood at sms then
| crop_rotation wrote:
| SMS is never claiming to be E2E nor is any army of SMS
| defenders online talking about how some virtue of SMS is
| almost same as E2E. While I don't like Telegram I will
| happily admit it is better than SMS, but how is that an
| argument for anything.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| SMS isn't an app, it's a protocol that was created in
| 1992.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Is the server -> FSB connection encrypted?
| paxys wrote:
| End-to-end encryption isn't going to help if the chatbot/data
| harvester is embedded in the app itself.
| bboygravity wrote:
| Or if the endpoints are mostly pwned by NSA at all times
| (Android, Windows).
| numpad0 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| timewizard wrote:
| 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.
| afavour wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Doesn't feel much different than Google paying for being the
| default in browsers
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| fhd2 wrote:
| 4) Search already has working monetisation through ads.
| They can acquire users at profit, as opposed to at a loss.
| guywithahat wrote:
| Yeah but chat results in paid subscriptions and it
| disincentives telegram from creating their own AI chat.
| Google also pays for most browsers and other ecosystems
| which aren't really considered "locked"
| bognition wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| _> 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?
| rcoveson wrote:
| Huge oversight by Google. Now they're going to have to
| invent some other way to indicate that you want to show
| hidden search results and inodes.
| input_sh wrote:
| That's not disabling it, that's a funky workaround that
| happens to work for now.
| Arnavion wrote:
| Wonder if DDG can be convinced to append that automatically
| for !g queries...
| blibble wrote:
| I've got a violentmonkey script to redirect any
| google.com query to the non-AI version
|
| (unfortunately not on this PC else I'd paste it)
| dowager_dan99 wrote:
| or instead of searching for "best dog breeds for
| apartments" change it to "best f'in dog breeds for tiny
| s-hole apartments" - feels much more cathartic
| floren wrote:
| You can say "fucking" and "shit" on HN
| Evidlo wrote:
| Or use this search URL: https://www.google.com/search?clien
| t=firefox-b-1-d&q=%s&udm=...
|
| Firefox: `Edit > Settings > Search > Add`, then set as
| default
|
| This also disables Google's automatic product search mode
| that sometimes triggers.
| frabcus wrote:
| Because it isn't disabling them - that would be an option
| to actually disable them.
|
| Of course there are hacks round it, but ultimately Google
| want us to have the AI summaries, don't care about user
| choice, and the best course of action is to change search
| engine.
| fhd2 wrote:
| Well, there's -ai for Google.
|
| I do take some grim satisfaction from having Google pay for
| inference and then ignoring it though.
| FredPret wrote:
| If they invest in nuclear stations, they may get AI slop
| "too cheap to meter"
| desdenova wrote:
| The models that run the search overview slop are probably
| some shitty 1B models running as cheaply as possible.
| enceladus06 wrote:
| Just like the Google+ days.
| babypuncher wrote:
| 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.
| luma wrote:
| 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.
| cheema33 wrote:
| > xAI has essentially zero market outside of twitter
|
| I suspect some MAGA use it.
| luma wrote:
| Are they paying for API hits and developing application
| stacks around the service? It's clear who _uses it_ ,
| it's a lot less clear who might be willing to _pay for
| it_.
| bobxmax wrote:
| 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
| hwillis wrote:
| You sound like a Madoff investor
| bobxmax wrote:
| I don't think you know what Madoff did.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > We've seen multiple companies in the last twelve months
| blast past any past benchmark of fastest growing company
| ever.
|
| So tonight I'm gonna party like it's 1999
| bobxmax wrote:
| No, dot com companies were famous for soaring valuations
| that WEREN'T revenue generating. Learn your history.
| ryandrake wrote:
| 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?
| theideaofcoffee wrote:
| I think it's probably as simple as some old fool on Sand
| Hill Rd got suckered into writing a check for this nonsense
| with promises of world domination by AI's promised infinite
| profit with minimal cost. And to keep the whole charade
| going, everyone has to pretend that this will eventually
| see some returns otherwise the whole farcical system will
| come crashing down. We can only hope that happens and some
| correction rears its head.
|
| The end result being all of us suffers in some way for the
| greed of a handful.
| Disposal8433 wrote:
| > What in the world is going on here? What am I not
| understanding?
|
| I don't think you're wrong in any way. I've been in denial
| for the past few years because the world is going crazy
| with AI and politics. But it's actually very good for me
| because I'm shunning all that shit and I focus on local
| people and local problems more: taking care of the finances
| of a non-profit, being more available for my friends and
| relatives, solving actual problems that people may have,
| etc. Denial is great and it makes more active. The downside
| is that I now have the calendar of a CEO and less time for
| me, but I believe the world need some care and we all can
| do something about it by doing small stuff.
| overfeed wrote:
| FOMO. Everyone is trying to landgrab as much territory as
| possible with the hope of piles and piles of money in the
| future.
|
| What looks like irrational exuberance to sceptics is a
| perfectly reasonable attempt to not miss out on the next
| "iPhone moment" by the believers.
| ryandrake wrote:
| But the land they're grabbing is desert with no water and
| no access roads. Does anyone besides the few with their
| wealth invested in AI believe that AI is the next iPhone
| moment?
| overfeed wrote:
| > Does anyone besides the few with their wealth invested
| in AI believe that AI is the next iPhone moment?
|
| It doesn't matter because for such an industry-wide hype,
| there are no consequences for being wrong. If a CEO
| ignores AI and it does become the next iPhone moment,
| they'll be deposed in short order. If "everyone" is wrong
| and nothing comes off AI, they'll write off some
| investments, write some "What we learned" LinkedIn posts,
| and carry on. Our existing framework has no incentives to
| correct or innoculate agaisnt hypes led by the
| management/capital classes
| rchaud wrote:
| What's not to understand? Enormous amounts of money have
| accrued to a tiny proportion of humanity in the past 30 or
| so years. There is no way there wouldn't be tons of waste
| when spending decisions are made by so few people.
|
| Now add in the fact that these decision makers are often
| openly avaricious egomaniacs who don't even make symbolic
| efforts help the poor and vulnerable, that narrows the
| scope of their spending to wasteful, sometimes outright
| harmful investments.
| seanhunter wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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)
| alterom wrote:
| Here's an evidence-based theory for you then:
|
| Not just "report to authorities"; the combination is an
| amazing spying and disinformation vector.
|
| Telegram (made by a Russian citizen) is a very popular
| messaging app in Ukraine.
|
| Russia is actively using Telegram for its war needs, relying
| on it for tasks ranging from recruitment and sabotage [1] to
| controlling Shahed drones via Telegram bots [2] (and, of
| course, spreading malware in targeted cyber attacks [3]).
|
| Ukraine has been warned about Telegram being a security risk
| due to the company having employees in Russia at the very
| least [4], and Ukraine has taken steps to limit the network's
| usage by government employees [5].
|
| Still, Telegram rules supreme as _the_ social network and
| messaging tool in Ukraine, with both government channel,
| opposition, and whistleblowers using Telegram.
|
| Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, has _ostensibly_ had a
| falling out with FSB and Russian government over refusal to
| cooperate [6]; the first social network he made -- VKontakte,
| a Facebook analogue that has far outpaced Facebook in Russia
| -- was effectively expropriated by the state, forcing Durov
| into a sort of exile.
|
| _A sort of_ exile, because it is not a real one. FSB and
| Durov must have found enough to agree on, as Durov has
| visited Russia at least 14 times during his "exile"[7], and
| Putin's regime remained quite amenable to Telegram's
| operation in Russia.
|
| Still, while Durov may still hold a grudge, Elon Musk has
| exhibited an openly pro-Russian stance over the past years
| [8], and is in regular direct contact with Putin [9].
|
| Musk has drawn ire from Ukraine over calls to formally give
| up claims to Crimea two years ago [10], and, after providing
| Starlink to Ukraine as a gesture of goodwill, intervened in
| Ukraine military operations to sabotage Ukrainian attacks on
| Russian military assets in Crimea "to avoid escalation" [11],
| effectively dictating US foreign policy using Starlink as a
| leverage.
|
| Since then, the Pentagon has taken over managing Starlink in
| Ukraine [12], enabling Ukraine to conduct audacious massive
| air and naval drone strikes over Crimea [13], and effectively
| nullifying Russian naval presence in the Black Sea [14].
|
| This was achieved in spite of Musk's wishes. Notably, no
| observable "escalation" resulted from this in a war which
| _already_ involved millions of people over a 1000km
| frontline.
|
| This may soon change, as Musk's role in the US government
| grew much more prominent since Trump's election, while Musk-
| Putin relationship only grows warmer.
|
| In particular, Musk alone merited singular praise from Putin
| himself, who called Musk a "rare pioneer" [15].
|
| Unsurprisingly, FBI whistleblower has revealed that Musk has
| been "extensively targeted" by the FSB in their efforts to
| turn him into a Russian asset [16] (Musk has seemingly
| ignored the warnings from the FBI).
|
| Which brings us back to X and Grok.
|
| After Musk took over Twitter, his new policies made the
| platform a particularly fertile ground for Russian propaganda
| efforts [17].
|
| When it comes to AI, Russia has not only been using LLMs to
| shape opinions at scale [18].
|
| Russia went beyound that, and is now seen actively
| manipulating training sets for AI chatbots to make them spit
| out Russian propaganda [19][20].
|
| These effects are most prominent in Russian and Ukrainian
| [21], indicating Russia's focus in this act of information
| warfare.
|
| The Newsguard report that, when it comes to Russian
| narratives, leading LLM Chatbots -- xAI's Grok among them --
| are spreading misinformation about a third of the time [22].
|
| In light of the above, _incentivized_ integration of Grok
| into Telegram is less is less if a conspiracy, and more of an
| open act of information warfare.
|
| Because in short, we have:
|
| - Telegram, which is...
|
| * a platform with immense reach in Ukraine
|
| * extensively used by Russia's spying, misinformation, and
| sabotage efforts
|
| * literally weaponized by Russia (e.g. to coordinate Shahed
| drones in flight)
|
| * officially recognized by Ukrainian government as a threat
| factor in the Russia-Ukraine war
|
| * a platform that operates _in Russia_ , where it is very
| popular (where nothing exists without government's blessing)
|
| * a platform developed by Pavel Durov, a Russian citizen that
| visits Russia regularly
|
| - Elon Musk, who is a person...
|
| * extensively targeted by FSB
|
| * known for his pro-Russian, anti-Zelenskyy public stance
|
| * with a history of actions benefiting Russian war effort
|
| * in direct contact with Putin, and gets _direct public
| praise_ from Putin
|
| * whose takeover of Twitter resulted in the platform
| spreading Russian propaganda at a larger scale
|
| * whose AI tool, Grok, is targeted in (and used for) Russia's
| war in Ukraine and other propaganda efforts
|
| Now we have Musk _(who 's amenable to Russia and praised by
| Putin)_ paying Durov _(a Russian citizen)_ to integrate Grok
| _(Musk 's LLM targeted & poisoned by Russian misinformation)_
| into Telegram _(a critical communication network in both
| Russia and Ukraine, where it 's been used as an attack vector
| in the war)_.
|
| It's not a _conspiracy_ to infer that Grok would be used by
| Russia to amplify _what they are already doing_ with Grok and
| Telegram when these tools -- made by people with direct ties
| to Russia and Putin -- are integrated.
|
| Telegram is notoriously effective in getting around bans and
| firewalls.
|
| Ukraine better figure out how to convince its citizens to
| switch to something else. _Anything else_ , really.
|
| ___________
|
| [1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=svbjm0FizmE
|
| [2] https://kyivindependent.com/russia-using-telegram-bots-
| to-co...
|
| [3] https://thehackernews.com/2024/10/russian-espionage-
| group-ta...
|
| [4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2022/02/25/uk
| rai...
|
| [5] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/09/technology/ukraine-
| russia...
|
| [6] https://meduza.io/en/feature/2024/08/27/someone-who-
| refuses-...
|
| [7] https://istories.media/en/news/2024/08/27/pavel-durov-
| has-vi...
|
| [8] https://www.france24.com/en/americas/20250430-elon-musk-
| twit...
|
| [9] https://apnews.com/article/musk-putin-x-trump-tesla-
| election...
|
| [10] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/musk-suggests-
| ukraine...
|
| [11] https://apnews.com/article/spacex-ukraine-starlink-
| russia-ai...
|
| [12] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-06-13/penta
| gon-...
|
| [13] https://kyivindependent.com/massive-drone-attack-
| targets-rus...
|
| [14] https://jamestown.org/program/innovative-ukrainian-
| naval-tac...
|
| [15] https://www.politico.eu/article/vladimir-putin-lauds-
| elon-mu...
|
| [16] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-
| interactive/2025/may/...
|
| [17] https://demostat.rs/en/vesti/edukacija/musks-x-policy-
| helped...
|
| [18] https://thenextweb.com/news/llms-generative-ai-
| information-w...
|
| [19] https://www.heise.de/en/news/Poisoning-training-data-
| Russian...
|
| [20]
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/04/17/llm-
| poi...
|
| [21] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S07365
| 8532...
|
| [22] https://www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/a-well-funded-
| moscow...
| linkage wrote:
| 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.
| afavour wrote:
| $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.
| smeeth wrote:
| It did buy them a hell of a lot of marketing, Telegram has
| a billion users and those users are mostly in countries
| where Musk's brand isn't as toxic.
| mrweasel wrote:
| It's honestly a good fit. Telegram also doesn't have the
| best image, but people don't care, so it's highly likely
| that they also don't care about the image of XAI or Musk.
|
| I do struggle with the 1 billion users, but I also don't
| believe that X has 600 million users actual users.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| You really believe 1/8th of the world is on telegram?
| overfeed wrote:
| Telegram is ostensibly a competitor if you buy into
| Musk's pitch for X as an "everything app". Paying
| Telegram $300M instead of developing chat features and/or
| marketing proves that plans for the "everything app" are
| dead in the water, or perhaps were never sincere from the
| get go.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| >$300m could buy you a hell of a lot of marketing, no?
|
| a quick google search shown Telegram have 1 billion users
| worldwide.
|
| >X/xAI/Musk's brand is toxic
|
| Is it?
| saubeidl wrote:
| It sure seems so:
|
| https://www.arenaev.com/teslas_european_sales_keep_fallin
| g_w...
|
| https://electrek.co/2025/02/03/teslas-sales-drop-double-
| digi...
| input_sh wrote:
| > Is it?
|
| Yes.
| andrewinardeer wrote:
| I know my experience is anecdotal, however, I know at
| least three people at my workplace who have said in our
| Slack channel they will never, ever but a Tesla because
| of Musk's antics while typing it using a Statlink
| connection.
| overfeed wrote:
| It sounds like they'll buy an alternative product when
| one is available. Tesla, X, and xAI all have multiple
| viable alternatives - superior alternatives even. That's
| not yet the case for Starlink in many locations[0], but
| in 5-10 years, your colleague may be using an Amazon
| Kuiper, One World, Garmin[1], or Apple[1] connection.
|
| 0. Symmetric gigabit fiber Internet remains the gold
| standard, where one _can_ get it, but unfortunately that
| 's not many places.
|
| 1. I hope these companies are at least looking into doing
| these, as it's adjacent to their current products.
| mattstir wrote:
| We'll have to see how privacy is handled (whether you can
| opt out of it suckling on every one of your personal
| conversations) but assuming some baseline decency from
| Telegram, I don't think anyone would be "forced" to use it.
|
| > 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
|
| This statement is baking in a lot of personal convictions,
| even if they feel self-evident. Telegram has a billion
| users and not everyone one of them will share those views.
| This setup is a lot closer to Google paying Apple and
| Mozilla to be the default search engine than some desperate
| attempt to get people to play with your toys.
| oblio wrote:
| 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.
| saubeidl wrote:
| 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.
| fourseventy wrote:
| Most people have no idea who the CEO of the various tech
| companies are and don't care.
| saubeidl wrote:
| I don't think that's true. Pretty much everyone knows
| that Twitter is owned by the guy who gives Nazi salutes
| and supports far right parties abroad.
| afavour wrote:
| True, but Musk is an exception. And deliberately so, his
| media image was one of the things that made Tesla so
| notable. But we're seeing recently that it goes both
| ways.
| drivingmenuts wrote:
| It's maddening that everyone seems to just overlook the
| whole neo-Nazi supporter bit.
| overfeed wrote:
| Musk was the PR, press and Marketing departments rolled
| into one for Tesla and X, so much so that he fired the PR
| team at Twitter.
|
| "The public doesn't care who the CEO is" is certifiably
| not true for Musk ventures, and Musk exploited that brand
| value in the past positively. The inauguration Seig Heil,
| and the subsequent DOGE misadventures are the other side
| of that "personal brand" coin, which very much exists for
| this CEO.
| stackedinserter wrote:
| Don't overestimate the size of that portion.
| saubeidl wrote:
| Don't underestimate it. https://www.arenaev.com/teslas_eu
| ropean_sales_keep_falling_w...
| abletonlive wrote:
| It's fair to underestimate it when Tesla is still the
| dominant fully EV automaker globally and in all the
| markets that this article talks about.
| seangrogg wrote:
| By what metric(s)? Not being disingenuous, purely
| curious.
| abletonlive wrote:
| By number of fully EV sold each quarter. Take out hybrids
| from the metric because Tesla does not make hybrids
| seangrogg wrote:
| Valid. And I do think they'll continue to own the lion's
| share of total sales for a while. But is there any
| concern over their being down YOY for Q1 while other
| manufacturers are largely growing? Or is the expectation
| that it's a temporary blip and they'll continue growing
| in the upcoming quarters from previous YOY numbers?
| overfeed wrote:
| > And I do think they'll continue to own the lion's share
| of total sales for a while
|
| Maybe in the US where they are protected from Chinese
| competition. Tesla's fall in Europe has been precipitous,
| falling by more than 50% YoY. BYD sales overtook Tesla
| for the first time ever in the last quarter in Western
| Europe.
| ascorbic wrote:
| Don't underestimate how far they've fallen. Tesla is
| nowhere near the top in Europe anymore. VW sold three
| times as many EVs as Tesla, with BYD in second place.
|
| https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tesla-just-got-overtaken-
| euro...
| abletonlive wrote:
| This is wrong and I would encourage you to check your
| sources or look into the industry more before posting a
| blind yahoo article that was clearly written by AI.
|
| VW did not sell three times as many EVs as Tesla.
| https://www.carscoops.com/2025/04/vw-finally-beats-tesla-
| out...
|
| In many of the comparisons, they try to make it more
| dramatic than it really is by saying volkswagen as an
| entire brand sold X more than tesla. Well of course they
| did, they sell hybrids and ICE vehicles too.
|
| > Tesla is nowhere near the top in Europe anymore.
|
| This is factually incorrect. They are #2 overall BEV
| sales in europe for Q1 2025 and also own #1 and #2 spots
| for best selling BEV models.
|
| I would expect such a low quality comment from reddit,
| not HN, but alas here we are in 2025.
|
| And additional reminder for folks that have an axe to
| grind that perhaps clouds their judgement of reality:
| when you've dominated the BEV market for almost 10 years,
| going sideways and down in marketshare is pretty much the
| only option.
| seangrogg wrote:
| Definitely makes sense that if they are a market leader
| for an extended period of time they would expect to trade
| sideways; my question is whether or not Tesla is expected
| to come out stronger as a growth company in the upcoming
| quarters (i.e. their recent talks of doing robotaxi work;
| are investors seeing that as a serious growth angle?) or
| should Tesla begin investigating an income/dividend stock
| angle?
| Spooky23 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| This is mostly a HCI problem - Google's AI interface for eg.
| is horrible, but Perplexity is a joy to use.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| Tech fascists have the best ai, great.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| This type of legalized data exfiltration doesn't come cheap.
| apercu wrote:
| Completely agree, but another way to look at it is that Elmo is
| using someone else's money anyway...
| 98codes wrote:
| 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.
| asadotzler wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| it's quite possible many model producers are trying to do this
| with telegram, and therefore there is a price for exclusivity?
| msgodel wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| smeeth wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Google does it to hinder competition, so it is telling.
| nemomarx wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Tycho wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| OpenAI is not paying Apple though. Only money exchange that
| happens is the cut Apple takes of the subscriptions.
| Tycho wrote:
| But then I suppose it's also payment-in-kind if they are
| serving the (non-premium) iPhone requests for free.
| hu3 wrote:
| Could you share a source for the OpenAI deal?
|
| What I could find is that iPhone users get it for free
| regardless:
|
| https://openai.com/index/openai-and-apple-announce-
| partnersh...
|
| > The ChatGPT integration, powered by GPT-4o, will come to
| iOS, iPadOS, and macOS later this year. Users can access it
| for free without creating an account, and ChatGPT
| subscribers can connect their accounts and access paid
| features right from these experiences.
| MaxPock wrote:
| Or Google paying Apple 20 billion dollars to be the default
| search engine in Apple devices
| alterom wrote:
| >Same as OpenAI paying Apple to integrate ChatGPT with
| Siri/iPhone.
|
| With the exception that Putin isn't openly praising people
| who are running OpenAI, and Apple isn't a company run by a
| Russian citizen with immense reach in Russia and Ukraine.
|
| Here, we have Musk _(who 's amenable to Russia and praised by
| Putin)_ paying Durov _(a Russian citizen)_ to integrate Grok
| _(Musk 's LLM targeted & poisoned by Russian misinformation)_
| into Telegram _(Durov 's critical communication network in
| both Russia and Ukraine, where it's been used as an attack
| vector in the war)_.
|
| They are paying for a bit more than _distribution_ , and I
| don't mean xAI.
|
| I have about two dozen sources for this claim (and a detailed
| breakdown) in this comment:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44116862#44118558
|
| I politely ask HN users to please read it before responding
| to this one.
| abrahadabra wrote:
| Durov is also a citizen of France and the UAE.
| dmix wrote:
| How is it different than Google paying Firefox?
| hirako2000 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It's training data. That's all that Felon wants.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Flawed logic.
|
| Google pays Mozilla for a spot in Firefox.
| asadotzler wrote:
| 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.
| moralestapia wrote:
| *sigh*
|
| Let's see if this helps you grasp it ...
|
| "Feels oh so telling that Google has to pay Mozilla and not
| the other way around. If these offerings were so great
| wouldn't we all be clamoring for it?"
| aresant wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I think this deal is more xAI buying advertising for Grok in
| Telegram.
| johnfn wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Yes
| abletonlive wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > "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.
| abletonlive wrote:
| They pretty much did say "not the other way around" with
|
| "If these offerings were so great wouldn't we all be
| clamoring for it?"
|
| The entire question is flawed. It's a rhetorical question
| and the implication is "these offerings are not so great
| and we aren't clamoring for it".
|
| I'd argue we are clamoring for it, and we have a lot of
| options here and they are all great options.
|
| But since the rhetorical question is flawed you now have
| nothing to anchor on to know exactly what OP meant because
| if they are flawed here that means whatever they meant in
| the first half of the comment is also likely flawed.
|
| Maybe you're not as good at reading between the lines, or
| the line in general, as much as you think you are and
| you're actually the LCD that would be served by a deeper
| comment.
|
| The whole point of the comment is that it is "telling" of
| something but the commenter at this point could come back
| and basically go in any direction. That's an indication the
| comment is not saying enough...
| sidcool wrote:
| It's like Google paying Apple. Doesn't mean Google is bad, just
| means it needs the traffic and Apple has the reach.
| asadotzler wrote:
| 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?
| bobxmax wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| This makes Telegram a very minor owner of X.
| culebron21 wrote:
| 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.
| miohtama wrote:
| Telegram made $500M profit at ~1.3B revenue.
|
| Revenue comes from ads and premium users and some minor
| sources.
| jug wrote:
| Given the shady stuff there, sounds like a match made in heaven
| to be honest, haha...
| alterom wrote:
| A Russian asset making a deal with a Russian citizen is a match
| made in Moscow.
|
| Which isn't exactly heaven, even to those who get the most out
| of it.
| slt2021 wrote:
| this is actually pretty bad deal for russia. with xAI.
|
| US based company will get access to the messaging of all
| russians/ukrainians/Iranians (with soldiers being very well
| represented), with the ability to run NLP and identify
| information of great importance to the NSA/DoD/CIA.
|
| Imagine if AT&T routed all Americans' SMS/text messages to
| the Russian version of xAI, would you call this a bad deal
| for Russia or USA ????
| anonzzzies wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| spwa4 wrote:
| 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!
| fundad wrote:
| It wasn't about revenue, it was about a massive propaganda
| and surveillance apparatus.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Given Tesla's current prospects it seems more likely that xAI
| or SpaceX wind up bailing it out.
| h2782 wrote:
| 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.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _not deluding myself like so many these days that Tesla
| is dead_
|
| Nobody said it's dead. Just that the car part of the
| company, the stable part, is somewhere between being abused
| and neglected by Musk. While the self-driving part has no
| competitive advantage and the robotics part seems to have
| legitimate synergies with xAI.
| rendang wrote:
| Market seems to think pretty highly of Tesla's prospects
| given the 1T+ market cap
| XorNot wrote:
| I direct your attention to the market a few months before
| the 2008 crash.
| declan_roberts wrote:
| 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.
| overfeed wrote:
| > $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
| cosmicgadget wrote:
| 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.
| myko wrote:
| Definitely a good investment in taking over the presidency
| of the United States, but I don't feel like many bluechecks
| are still on Twitter? The platform feels dead, you can't
| even access it without logging in.
| ARandumGuy wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Wouldn't bullshit white power rants fit right in on telegram?
| bibinou wrote:
| @grok: is this true?
| bgwalter wrote:
| 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_dev wrote:
| 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.
| retornam wrote:
| 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.
| bn-l wrote:
| 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.
| retornam wrote:
| 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.
| northzen wrote:
| Still better and more feature rich than WA.
| retornam wrote:
| Indeed, it is undoubtedly advantageous for scammers and
| malware authors.
| northzen wrote:
| One day you will discover Internet and how advantageous it
| is for scammers and malware authors.
|
| Wtf is this argument even about? Knife is advantageous for
| robbers. Phone calls are advantageous for scammers.
|
| Your existence is advantageous for many malicious agents.
|
| So what?
| AmazingTurtle wrote:
| Thanks for this comment, came here to say the same thing.
| transcriptase wrote:
| Wait until you find out about IRC!
| retornam wrote:
| When was the last time you ran into an IRC CnC server?
| drivingmenuts wrote:
| 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).
| cheema33 wrote:
| > 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.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Just painted a target on Telegrams back as a channel to feed
| misinformation into Grok
| game_the0ry wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| oh, cause telegram is not a chat app, it's Facebook of eastern
| Europe
| game_the0ry wrote:
| And how is the data of Eastern Europe as valuable as xAI is
| paying for it?
| ZeroTalent wrote:
| $300M is not a lot of money in this situation
| XorNot wrote:
| AI training data is in short supply from new sources. Chat
| and group apps are handy for many reasons, but one obvious
| one is people posting images with caption text they provide
| basically does your image tagging for free (remember the
| original big image model was just a list of URLS with
| useful alt-text descriptions).
| bearjaws wrote:
| Used pretty heavily by island nations and LATAM.
| anbr wrote:
| intelligence gathering
| verdverm wrote:
| thought policing and influencing
|
| The value is in manipulation, not monies
| arizen wrote:
| Chat app with 1B+ users
| ben_w wrote:
| > 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...
| pier25 wrote:
| TIL Telegram has like 1 billion users.
| miohtama wrote:
| It has more users. 1B is monthly active if I recall
| correctly.
| cowpig wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| taurath wrote:
| 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.
| loopdoend wrote:
| Where are they going?
| Vilian wrote:
| Signal and matrix probably
| ben_w wrote:
| I was about to suggest Discord, but then I checked the news
| and it looks like that company is also in the middle of its
| own mid-life crisis?
| Vilian wrote:
| Discord is even worse than telegram
| pier25 wrote:
| how so?
| taurath wrote:
| 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.
| Klonoar wrote:
| Most of that crowd that I interact with was already off
| Telegram to begin with, and (in some cases, begrudgingly)
| run their own Matrix instances.
|
| I think if you interact with non-tech-users, Signal is the
| go-to; Matrix has way too many thorns for normal users to
| put up with in comparison to the alternatives.
| culebron21 wrote:
| Confirming. Discussed this in many chats today.
| jaoane wrote:
| As a telegram user, to that I will say the same thing I would
| say to roma leaving: au revoir!
| _ink_ wrote:
| That might be finally a reason for my friends to leave that app.
| Klonoar wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| My god, the level of negativity about absolutely everything is
| insane.
| sMarsIntruder wrote:
| Negativity and hate.
| kklisura wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Unfortunately it's also the most sleek and feature-rich
| messenger of them all :(
| drdaeman wrote:
| 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.
| greenavocado wrote:
| The main Telegram enshittification is caused by spammers
| and scammers. They purchase lots of Telegram Premium
| credits and proceed to spam the hell out of users and they
| get away with it. Telegram Premium users are treated much
| more leniently than regular users when it comes to
| moderation affairs.
| int_19h wrote:
| Since the protocol is actually open, you don't have to use
| the official client.
|
| I'm curious as to why you say it was "never good for one-
| to-one private conversations". I've been using it for this
| exact thing for many years, and still find it the best
| option currently on the market for a variety of reasons
| (e.g. unlike Signal it doesn't limit the number of devices
| which are linked to the same account).
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I wasn't a telegram user for long so this may have
| changed but isn't the secret chat limited to device to
| device? So messages sent from my phone can't be decrypted
| by the same user account on my laptop?
|
| I just remember thinking, well this is dumb, and going
| back to Signal (Signal annoys me in other ways, requiring
| a single phone to be the "master" and other devices to be
| merely linked. I miss keybase, they had a great system
| including paper backups)
| distances wrote:
| What ads is Telegram showing? I can't think of any, except
| a peristent birthday reminder.
|
| I also agree with the sibling comment that Telegram is
| sadly the best chat app I've used not only for group chats
| but also for 1-to-1 chats.
|
| Edit: there are paid emojis or stickers too, now that I
| think about it.
| acjohnson55 wrote:
| I agree. I need to migrate off, but I haven't figured out
| where to yet.
| sorokod wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Its well known that whatsapp is also available in Russia
| machomaster wrote:
| 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.
| nickpsecurity wrote:
| I'll warn that the FBI was publicly trying to get warrants
| for information while they and NSA were siphoning it off in
| secret from the same companies. One was likely a cover for
| the other.
|
| Unless there's legal protections, assume in your threat
| model any company has let their host government, maybe
| others, backdoor their offerings. It might have been
| willingly or forced. Police states like U.S. and Russia
| should be assumed to subvert any pprovider.
|
| If they don't like that, they need to repeal the Patriot
| Act, ban requiring companies to attach black boxes to their
| internal systems, give companies immunity for publicly
| talking about court orders, require companies to disclose
| what data they give to the government, and let individuals
| know what was ordered after a period of time. Then, I might
| trust statements about what they do or don't share.
|
| Also, if these bother you, try not to commit crimes.
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| > I'll warn that the FBI was publicly trying to get
| warrants for information while they and NSA were
| siphoning it off in secret from the same companies. One
| was likely a cover for the other
|
| That's a wildly ignorant take, but it makes for a nice
| conspiracy theory if you make no effort at all to
| understand the legalities.
|
| Different warrants authorise the collection and use of
| information for different purposes. FAA 702 warrants only
| authorise targeting non U.S. persons outside the United
| States for foreign intelligence purposes, where there is
| probable cause to believe the U.S. person is a foreign
| power or is an officer, employee, or agent of a foreign
| power.
|
| The FBI has criminal investigation and counterterrorism
| functions which relate to persons in the U.S. and/or
| where there is no connection to a foreign power. They
| obviously need different warrants to authorize those
| activities.
| SXX wrote:
| Telegram dont have E2EE by default. It's all you need to
| know. 99% of communications on Telegram are in plain text.
|
| Also Telegram banned or shadowbanned serveral protest
| channels / bots during elections and when war began.
| 0xy wrote:
| WhatsApp isn't E2EE by default either, since default flow
| pushes you to backup your key to Google Drive.
|
| Signal isn't E2EE, given the security blunder in which
| private images from your gallery were sent to random
| contacts (which indicates a scary state management
| situation in the apps, this isn't easy to do). E2EE
| implies that you purposely send content to specific
| people which is encrypted, not that your app sends
| potentially embarrassing or intimate pictures to your
| boss behind your back. That blunder is unforgivable.
| areyourllySorry wrote:
| i think we have different definitions of e2ee.
| greenavocado wrote:
| Many Telegram groups are only Play Store banned or banned
| access is restricted based on the user's phone number.
| This is why you must install the APK from their website
| directly instead of using an App Store version.
| psychoslave wrote:
| >Telegram won the battle and Putin had no choice but to
| admit defeat.
|
| That just seems such a unreal claim. Telegram removed
| features like "people nearby" after its CEO was arrested in
| France. Who seriously believe that the kind of threats
| France establishment would employ on such a person could
| dwarf those of Russia establishment in term of bending the
| braves?
| sidcool wrote:
| Every week, at least once I am added to a spam Telegram group. It
| was fun earlier, but now it's a nuisance.
| lawrencejgd wrote:
| You can change that in Settings - Privacy and security -
| Invitations - Select My contacts
| Suppafly wrote:
| >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.
| machomaster wrote:
| Not bizarre at all. How else would you invite people (study
| group, work, etc). Especially thinking 10 years back.
|
| This is a sensible default for most people. If it is no
| more, then settings can be changed.
| Suppafly wrote:
| Wouldn't you first add those people as a contact?
| phillipcarter wrote:
| 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.
| rchaud wrote:
| 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_19h wrote:
| 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.
| phillipcarter wrote:
| 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.
| hintymad wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "if it's free, then you are the product" applies here.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| Yes, this is why I switched from free Linux to paid Windows.
| I don't want to be the product.
| mystified5016 wrote:
| You're being deliberately obtuse
| juliend2 wrote:
| It's just a troll (although not valid in this context)
| counter-argument to the saying above.
| fundad wrote:
| It looks like Telegram sold the US government a back door to
| users' messages.
| DisjointedHunt wrote:
| 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.
| Suppafly wrote:
| If this is something their users actually wanted, they'd be
| paying xAI, not the other way around.
| hiddencost wrote:
| Like Google with Apple?
| eqvinox wrote:
| 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?
| spacebanana7 wrote:
| That's the industry consensus. Sam Altman talked about
| something similar on a Stratechery podcast.
|
| It not exactly unrealistic to imagine that people will ask
| LLMs about flights, hotels, restaurants or even insurance.
|
| All that needs to happen is for LLMs to add a "buy now"
| button, and for the provider to take a 15% commission
| (still a lower take rate than Expedia FWIW).
| s900mhz wrote:
| Perplexity basically has this right? They let you buy
| things with a button in the chat itself!
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Will? Are :)
| dmonitor wrote:
| ..and Honey will snipe their commission anyway
|
| https://fortune.com/2024/12/23/honey-extension-scam-
| drama/
| harmmonica wrote:
| I could use some help understanding this better. If you
| ask an LLM about flights or I think pretty much any of
| the categories of services you cite, what exactly would I
| expect to get back?
|
| The "dream" is that the LLM/AI does all the work for me
| and just magically gets me to "this is the perfect flight
| for you and here are the reasons" but I have to tell it
| the things I care about (price, time, etc.). A lot of the
| time it's not exactly clear, even to me, which of those
| parameters matter the most so as a consumer it's actually
| nice to see, for instance, the options with
| times/costs/stops/etc. and for me to be able to look
| those over and make a decision. The LLM could provide
| those options, but then what has it done that I wasn't
| able to do with Google Flights or another ota? Is it just
| using more natural language in the request? Or do most
| people really want to wholesale handoff the decision and
| just go with the "trustworthy" LLM/assistant without any
| of the rationale?
|
| I suppose actual personal assistants do that type of
| thing all the time for wealthy people, but that doesn't
| seem like it would be applicable to the masses who
| want/need to comparison shop for the best deal that meets
| a bunch of criteria.
|
| I say this as someone who gets major value out of LLMs
| already, but for buying things in particular I'm
| struggling to understand why you'd want to hand off the
| "browsing" and just fast forward to the "buying."
| spacebanana7 wrote:
| I see there as being two main types of people who'd
| benefit from using LLMs for booking flights.
|
| The first are power users, in the sense of people who
| have complex requests. Like those who'd ask for the
| cheapest flights from Manchester to Turkey during the
| summer school holidays for without layovers unless those
| layovers were in Paris, for a holiday to be roughly 10
| days long, excluding very early morning flights. Such a
| request could be made with existing OTAs, but would be
| painfully time consuming.
|
| The other type of user for whom LLMs might be useful are
| the opposite, those with very loose requirements. Think
| "get me a flight to a warm place tomorrow".
|
| Skyscanner etc would still have value for the people in
| the middle.
| siriusfeynman wrote:
| Already here with google's ADK (agent development kit)
|
| https://google.github.io/adk-docs/tools/built-in-
| tools/#goog...
|
| > When you use grounding with Google Search, and you
| receive Search suggestions in your response, you must
| display the Search suggestions in production and in your
| applications. For more information on grounding with Google
| Search, see Grounding with Google Search documentation for
| Google AI Studio or Vertex AI. The UI code (HTML) is
| returned in the Gemini response as renderedContent, and you
| will need to show the HTML in your app, in accordance with
| the policy.
| hintymad wrote:
| Maybe xAI has some interesting way to make money in other
| places, like Google paying Mozilla for making Google search the
| default choice.
| zinglersen wrote:
| It's the same reason for Google and xAI - they want user data
| and are more than happy to pay for it.
| nikanj wrote:
| Google is paying Mozilla to keep Firefox on life support - so
| that they can pretend Chrome has competitors
| nerbert wrote:
| Directly taken from Gate's book.
| throwanem wrote:
| Is or was? They just lost that suit, didn't they?
| malfist wrote:
| The case hasn't been decided yet
| Hoasi wrote:
| Exactly, but what users want is not part of this equation.
| splatter9859 wrote:
| 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.
| serial_dev wrote:
| I'm sorry, I don't think this is on Musk or xAI. IMO it is
| on Telegram. Only Telegram has the obligation to know what
| their users want and look out for their own users. It's not
| unreasonable for Grok to want to have more users.
| dotcoma wrote:
| Maybe not. But how much are they going to make by
| spending these 300 million USD ?
| colordrops wrote:
| Are you claiming it's a stupid business decision, or
| something else? Because they must be thinking that there
| is a profit to be made somewhere, either through training
| data or brand exposure to Telegram's 1 billion users.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Or Musk just want to say "hey, we growed in users by x%"
| this year so that he can keep pretending being in the
| race, for some street cred', like the way he pays some
| progamer in Asia to boost his PoE2 account.
| prettyblocks wrote:
| As a Telegram user, I don't mind having an interface to Grok
| that is outside of X.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Isn't that grok.com? There is also a grok iOS and Android
| app (though the Android app is apparently a bit of a 2nd
| class citizen)
|
| Admittedly, some of the uses in the article do sound
| useful. Time will tell
| nickpsecurity wrote:
| 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.
| rchaud wrote:
| 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.
| akurtzhs wrote:
| Paypal paid people to open an account or to refer new
| accounts early on. Inspired Dropbox to do the same thing
| with free storage.
| edent wrote:
| PayPal still regularly send out offers which pay new users.
|
| https://www.paypal.com/uk/webapps/mpp/invite/terms
|
| It is a common way for businesses to acquire customers.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| 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.
| outside1234 wrote:
| And deleting the Telegram app. Will save me time anyway closing
| spam messages.
| l5870uoo9y wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Interesting!
| pseudony wrote:
| 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_ wrote:
| The Facebook-inspired pogroms in Myanmar were a prologue to the
| horrors that this will incite
| baxtr wrote:
| Can you elaborate on that? How can xAI integration into
| telegram incite pogroms?
| jonny_eh wrote:
| It has been injected with politically motivated bias:
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/may/14/elon-
| musk...
| slt2021 wrote:
| 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)
| miohtama wrote:
| 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.
| EastSmith wrote:
| "No deal has been signed" per Elon Musk post on X.
| EastSmith wrote:
| "No deal has been signed" per Elon Musk's post on X just now.
| dawnerd wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| If your llm is so unpopular that you have to pay people to use
| it, you should probably just stop
| duskwuff wrote:
| The situation just got murkier:
| https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1927839555828220165
|
| ("@durov @grok No deal has been signed")
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| 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.
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