Just painted a target on Telegrams back as a channel to feed misinformation into Grok
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
#102Feels 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 pre…
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.
Re: xAI to pay telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat app
#103Call 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.
Re: xAI to pay telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat app
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
$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.
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.
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.
Re: xAI to pay telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat app
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Don't look under the hood at sms then
SMS isn't an app, it's a protocol that was created in 1992.
Re: xAI to pay telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat app
#106Telegram 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.
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.
Re: xAI to pay telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat app
#107Feels 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?
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.
Or Google paying Apple 20 billion dollars to be the default search engine in Apple devices
Re: xAI to pay telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat app
#108Feels 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?
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
Re: xAI to pay telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat app
#109This 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.
Re: xAI to pay telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat app
#110That might be finally a reason for my friends to leave that app.