XAI to pay Telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat app

Re:XAI to pay Telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat... by game_the0ry on Wednesday May 28, 2025 @01:17PM (#44118292)

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.

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Re:XAI to pay Telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat... by ben_w on Wednesday May 28, 2025 @03:09PM (#44119567)

> 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...

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Re:XAI to pay Telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat... by pier25 on Wednesday May 28, 2025 @03:46PM (#44119980)

TIL Telegram has like 1 billion users.

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Re:XAI to pay Telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat... by miohtama on Wednesday May 28, 2025 @05:30PM (#44120848)

It has more users. 1B is monthly active if I recall correctly.

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Re:XAI to pay Telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat... by z3dd on Wednesday May 28, 2025 @01:29PM (#44118455)

oh, cause telegram is not a chat app, it's Facebook of eastern Europe

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Re:XAI to pay Telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat... by game_the0ry on Wednesday May 28, 2025 @02:21PM (#44119021)

And how is the data of Eastern Europe as valuable as xAI is paying for it?

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Re:XAI to pay Telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat... by ZeroTalent on Wednesday May 28, 2025 @03:32PM (#44119830)

$300M is not a lot of money in this situation

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Re:XAI to pay Telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat... by XorNot on Wednesday May 28, 2025 @05:32PM (#44120866)

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).

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Re:XAI to pay Telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat... by bearjaws on Wednesday May 28, 2025 @05:09PM (#44120682)

Used pretty heavily by island nations and LATAM.

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Re:XAI to pay Telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat... by arizen on Wednesday May 28, 2025 @02:52PM (#44119378)

Chat app with 1B+ users

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Re:XAI to pay Telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat... by anbr on Wednesday May 28, 2025 @02:38PM (#44119197)

intelligence gathering

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Re:XAI to pay Telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat... by verdverm on Wednesday May 28, 2025 @04:23PM (#44120319)

thought policing and influencing

The value is in manipulation, not monies

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Re:XAI to pay Telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat... by cowpig on Wednesday May 28, 2025 @04:20PM (#44120298)

Seems fairly obvious that Musk's strategy is to monetize political influence, isn't it? It's just advertising but a leap darker

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Re:XAI to pay Telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat... by top_sigrid on Wednesday May 28, 2025 @05:47PM (#44120974)

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.

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Re:XAI to pay Telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat... by didibus on Wednesday May 28, 2025 @07:23PM (#44121494)

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

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Re:XAI to pay Telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat... by beAbU on Thursday May 29, 2025 @04:43AM (#44124155)

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.

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Re:XAI to pay Telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat... by throwaway290 on Thursday May 29, 2025 @11:16PM (#44132494)

Where is LLM in my whatsapp? Never seen it, latest version.

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Re:XAI to pay Telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat... by beAbU on Monday June 02, 2025 @05:35AM (#44157121)

On the chats tab, right above the green "+" floating button there is a "meta AI" icon on my version of WhatsApp. If you click on it it opens up a chat with the AI like normal.

I guess they are still rolling out the feature.

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Re:XAI to pay Telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat... by felipeerias on Wednesday May 28, 2025 @07:42PM (#44121604)

Nothing is more valuable for an AI company than exclusive access to large amounts of human-generated data.

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Re:XAI to pay Telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat... by rasz on Thursday May 29, 2025 @04:33AM (#44124121)

$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

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