Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 436 posts

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

#391

Post by herbst »

Suppafly wrote: post #172
lawrencejgd wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

>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.

If you use Telegram in a 100% private setting (only friends and family and private groups) you won't be invited anywhere else either.

When your name is out there in public channels things change. Just like with an email address

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

#392

Post by herbst »

mlinhares wrote: post #3
bognition wrote: post #2

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?

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

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

#393

Post by herbst »

taurath wrote: post #109

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, moderat…

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.

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

#394

Post by rasz »

game_the0ry wrote: post #103

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.

$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

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

#395

Post by MonkeyClub »

littlestymaar wrote: post #301
colordrops wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

That's quite a viable possibility, I don't get why you're getting downed.

Grok is indeed trailing the race and could use extra numbers. It doesn't matter to their bottom line (or their ad campaigns) if these numbers come from a flat rate agreement with Telegram.

If anything, Telegram should have bargained for more.

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

#396

Post by beAbU »

didibus wrote: post #339
game_the0ry wrote: post #103

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.

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

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.

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

#397

Post by runlevel1 »

andrekandre wrote: post #365
babypuncher wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> products that look like solutions to other executives but that don't solve any problems problems people in the real world intuitively, this looks like the root cause of enshitification imo... but idk maybe its something else...

Enshitification is often a company-wide culture problem, but the fish does rot from the head.

There are a variety of reasons why a company might begin to over-incentivize short-term gain (or high-stakes risk-taking) at the expense of customer happiness and possibly to the detriment of the company's long-term interests.

For example: Growth stagnation, an existential threat, a pessimistic long-term financial outlook, bad reward structure, low customer regard, organizational infighting, low employee retention, etc.

The sudden emergence of AI and volatile economy are triggering several of those for a boat load of companies. And, well, show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.

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

#398

Post by csomar »

wongarsu wrote: post #330
prettyblocks wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

That must be new because a few months ago I wanted to give it a try and the only option was to have a Twitter account.

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

#399

Post by alterom »

dayyan wrote: post #238
alterom wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

we aren't playing that game anymore

What game?

Is it "making a meaningful statement" or "citing sources for claims"?

Not like you're playing either game, so it's hard to guess.

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

#400

Post by alterom »

wltr wrote: post #382
alterom wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You cited your sources, but they are flagged and removed :) Because dang them, right?

HN (and the mods) seem to hate nothing more than a well-sourced, well-structured long comment.

The sources are still there though.

Post reply on HN