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.
Admittedly, some of the uses in the article do sound useful. Time will tell
But this is why we must champion open protocols and open source software.
I absolutely believe both LLMs and social media platforms should be federated and controlled by the user.
So, the question is whether they should pay to generate demand in a new market. Then, who to pay and how much?
I'll also note that OpenAI took the market by offering an expensive service for free (ChatGPT). Then, they offered a monthly plan that may or may not have been profitable. One could argue that OpenAI has been paying people to use its service for a long time.
I also wonder if xAI gets something out of it. For instance, they might get all the conversations with the AI. I believe ChatGPT similarly put free, user conversations to use internally in ways that boosted their paid apps. xAI might have some plays like that.
https://www.paypal.com/uk/webapps/mpp/invite/terms
It is a common way for businesses to acquire customers.
And to collect firefox user data. That't why firefox is always connected to e100.net.
For xAI to pay Telegram... where does xAI get value back out of that? I guess we'll be seeing AI with ads soon?
https://google.github.io/adk-docs/tools/built-in-tools/#goog...
> When you use grounding with Google Search, and you receive Search suggestions in your response, you must display the Search suggestions in production and in your applications. For more information on grounding with Google Search, see Grounding with Google Search documentation for Google AI Studio or Vertex AI. The UI code (HTML) is returned in the Gemini response as renderedContent, and you will need to show the HTML in your app, in accordance with the policy.
It not exactly unrealistic to imagine that people will ask LLMs about flights, hotels, restaurants or even insurance.
All that needs to happen is for LLMs to add a “buy now” button, and for the provider to take a 15% commission (still a lower take rate than Expedia FWIW).
The "dream" is that the LLM/AI does all the work for me and just magically gets me to "this is the perfect flight for you and here are the reasons" but I have to tell it the things I care about (price, time, etc.). A lot of the time it's not exactly clear, even to me, which of those parameters matter the most so as a consumer it's actually nice to see, for instance, the options with times/costs/stops/etc. and for me to be able to look those over and make a decision. The LLM could provide those options, but then what has it done that I wasn't able to do with Google Flights or another ota? Is it just using more natural language in the request? Or do most people really want to wholesale handoff the decision and just go with the "trustworthy" LLM/assistant without any of the rationale?
I suppose actual personal assistants do that type of thing all the time for wealthy people, but that doesn't seem like it would be applicable to the masses who want/need to comparison shop for the best deal that meets a bunch of criteria.
I say this as someone who gets major value out of LLMs already, but for buying things in particular I'm struggling to understand why you'd want to hand off the "browsing" and just fast forward to the "buying."
The first are power users, in the sense of people who have complex requests. Like those who’d ask for the cheapest flights from Manchester to Turkey during the summer school holidays for without layovers unless those layovers were in Paris, for a holiday to be roughly 10 days long, excluding very early morning flights. Such a request could be made with existing OTAs, but would be painfully time consuming.
The other type of user for whom LLMs might be useful are the opposite, those with very loose requirements. Think “get me a flight to a warm place tomorrow”.
Skyscanner etc would still have value for the people in the middle.
Is it "making a meaningful statement" or "citing sources for claims"?
Not like you're playing either game, so it's hard to guess.
[1] https://www.vanderbilt.edu/unity/2023/04/07/first-ever-vande...
Russia punches above their weight because people believe what they want to believe (and what their peer group they want to fit in to believes), and are easily corruptible by "small" amounts of money. And they have nukes.
It's billionaires helping billionaires.
https://fortune.com/article/russian-president-vladimir-putin...
This is not a sentence in English.
>Why would powerful people in the US succumb to to Russia's influence?
I have cited my sources; please read this comment for more details:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44118558
>Russia has the GDP of a province of China. Russia does not have a thriving manufacturing sector. Russia has increasingly less influence or power over the world.
Bravo, you're starting to figure out that having influence over people doesn't need any of that.
Russia does have a thriving propaganda manufacturing sector, and invests a lot of its GDP in FSB. Hmm.
>If anything, maybe the Lenin-loving Stalin-admiring Marxists would love Russia, like half of the university professors in the 50s.
They would, and they still do.
Many eggs in many baskets, see.
Again — I've cited my sources; you're welcome to stay wilfully ignorant and be asking the same questions in subsequent comments.
I'll be here at day.
> I'll be here at day.
i hate to heckle, but... :)
I'll be here all day, using flow typing on my phone :)
Because dang them, right?
The sources are still there though.
Yet, they did not bother to remove my useless neighbouring comment, only flagged it. I’m not surprised anymore. Not the first time I see this behaviour.
Because, as we've learned from another post here on HN, 90% of the population lack the functional literacy necessary for comprehending long passes of texts (and extracting supporting information from references):
https://kittenbeloved.substack.com/p/college-english-majors-...
And, alas, I've provided more than a spoonful of context here.
That — and the efforts of Russian propagandists at work.
We'd be naive to think they aren't active on HN like they're on reddit; and that's before getting into examining the effectiveness of Russian-style propaganda on the core HN audience.
There's no reason for Grok to pay this much for the deal unless either Telegram sees it as a net negative that needs reimbursement or they're competing with other bids.
Users wouldn't specifically ask for Grok, but they might like to have access to an AI assistant. When you are competing against OpenAI etc. it makes sense to incentivise big, PR generating customers such as Telegram.
This is a data sale, pure and simple.