Never usually is with Musk and his platforms. Both X and Tesla's software stack clearly show this readily. He has other purposes in mind.

I’m sorry, I don’t think this is on Musk or xAI. IMO it is on Telegram. Only Telegram has the obligation to know what their users want and look out for their own users. It’s not unreasonable for Grok to want to have more users.

Maybe not. But how much are they going to make by spending these 300 million USD ?

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.

yes telegram user need a conspiracy theory friendly chatbot and grok needs users… win win win

Who knows how much they’ll make off the data they obtain from users and chat history data, but in this day and age, no one gets paid to integrate AI, they pay for it which means there is clearly some other goal. And I can tell you there is a reason he didn’t make this offer to Signal instead, where they wouldn’t have access to any chat history, and that it would mean xAI (at this point which looks more like a data harvesting company) becoming a “partner” would normally allow data to be handed over. In this case, however, that isn’t necessary since lTelegram’s privacy policy is basically, “we can use your data for whatever we want”, including selling it for 300 million and claiming it is the payment to integrate AI.

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.

Do you mind being sold to X for $300m?

I agree with you.

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.

Yeah, I'm not contesting that at all. I think Telegram sold its soul a long time ago, so I kind of just treat it as a self-contained socially oriented splinter-net with its own integrated app environment... and it's actually really cool and feature rich. I also find Grok to be an LLM that performs pretty well, so I don't mind the integration, much the same way I didn't mind the AI integrations into WhatsApp, but I understand that many people just want a messenger that's a messenger so I can understand the pushback.