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

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

#11

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.

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

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.

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

#12
post #6

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?

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

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

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

#13
post #6

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?

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

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.

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

#14
post #6

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?

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

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

#15
post #6

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?

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).

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

#17

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.

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

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

#18
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

It’s not X or Elon musk that you have to trust with regards to the privacy of your telegram conversations.

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

#19

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.

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.

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

#20
post #6

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?

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)

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