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.
> 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/
The situation just got murkier: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1927839555828220165
("@durov @grok No deal has been signed")
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.
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.
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?
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.
The Facebook-inspired pogroms in Myanmar were a prologue to the horrors that this will incite
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.
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.
Given the shady stuff there, sounds like a match made in heaven to be honest, haha...
Every week, at least once I am added to a spam Telegram group. It was fun earlier, but now it's a nuisance.
The $300M "in cash and xAI equity" could turn out to not be that much money, depending on what percentage of that was equity.
xAI recently raised at an $80B valuation and it's highly debatable if it's actually worth that...and who knows if you'd ever actually have a liquidation event.
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?
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.
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.
I don't understand how Telegram is still around. The app has zero support, even for paid users. You can't rely on it, and unlike Meta products, where at least there is someone to escalate to, in Telegram it's nonexistent. My account was taken over by a malicious actor, and I can't get it restored no matter how many emails and DMs on X I've sent them. Zero response
> 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?
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.
This makes Telegram a very minor owner of X.
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.
That is absurdly low given that grok probably will be learning from the inputs. If anything this number should be in the billions. Do telegram users even want this? I thought it was privacy focused app.
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)
Grok in Telegram? That’s one bold move by xAI. I'm curious to see how users actually engage with it in day-to-day conversations.
Well, I’ve been a really happy telegram user since at least 2014. If anything from xAI is forced on me I’m out asap.
Surprised to see Grok coming to Telegram—if true, this could shake up how we interact with AI inside messaging apps.
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?
If your llm is so unpopular that you have to pay people to use it, you should probably just stop
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
As a furry: nooooooooooooooo. Please God, no!
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.
Time to delete Telegram
@grok: is this true?
That might be finally a reason for my friends to leave that app.
Since Grok is too left leaning despite all of Musk's efforts, he needs to get in some more training data that has an alt-right conspiracy bias.
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.
"No deal has been signed" per Elon Musk's post on X just now.
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.
Interesting!
Just painted a target on Telegrams back as a channel to feed misinformation into Grok
"No deal has been signed" per Elon Musk post on X.
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.
And deleting the Telegram app. Will save me time anyway closing spam messages.
My god, the level of negativity about absolutely everything is insane.
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.
If this is something their users actually wanted, they'd be paying xAI, not the other way around.