Exactly. Which do people think users will be more accepting of: “we sold all your data and chats for 300 million” or “we got paid 300 million to integrate AI”.
This is a data sale, pure and simple. xAI certainly isn’t making their money off their LLM/inference. OpenRouter shows Grok at about a billion tokens a day while the top 20 account for 2.5 trillion per day.
I’ve suspected Elon expanded his failing strategy to include data brokering when he saw the opportunity to get access to everyone’s data via Doge. Hence the reason Elon is ready to step away now that Doge (many of which are xAI employees) has finished gaining access to the data from every government system. Quietly offering access to corporate and political clients to query the data of every single person via Grok seems like an easy way to generate some revenue when no one wants your AI.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I thought that. Then, I remembered PayPal straight up paying people to use their platform. We saw how that worked out.
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.
When was PayPal doing that? I remember having to create an account 20 years ago because they were the only payment processor option on Ebay, that seemed to be their moat. These days, I use Paypal as a "wallet" that's connected to my CC, to pay for stuff on sites where I don't want to put in my CC information.
> If this is something their users actually wanted
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.
That shows that their trust in users selecting google as primary if given the option when setting up a new device is not high. Otherwise they’d negotiate it down.
I think the point is that users mostly don't bother selecting their search provider, many will simply use what is pre-configured. Google is paying Apple so nobody else will.
I don't think users really want this for what it's worth, but that's a bad argument. The median (social media) internet user pays exactly zero for anything, so deriving expectations from money is a bit silly. The actual currency to watch is attention. If they don't like it, engagement will drop.
That’s the industry consensus. Sam Altman talked about something similar on a Stratechery podcast.
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).
I could use some help understanding this better. If you ask an LLM about flights or I think pretty much any of the categories of services you cite, what exactly would I expect to get back?
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."
I see there as being two main types of people who’d benefit from using LLMs for booking flights.
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.
> 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.
Even if all this true, there’s unlikely to be a mass switch campaign until an alternative with better privacy and security gains the smoothness, flexibility, and platform coverage that Telegram has. Most people I know who use it do so because it runs everywhere, is nice to use, and isn’t a Facebook product (which while perhaps not being as bad as a foreign government, is a more prominently perceived threat for most people).
I really don't get the sentiment of everything Russia. 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. Why would powerful people in the US succumb to to Russia's influence? That just does not make sense. If anything, maybe the Lenin-loving Stalin-admiring Marxists would love Russia, like half of the university professors in the 50s loving the Soviet Union, to the point that they'd rather leak all kinds of information, including how to build atom bombs, to the Soviet Union. Oh, and New York Times even won a Pulitzer for praising the Soviet Union by the great Walter Duranty in the 1930s.
The "why" is definitely an important question, but it's certainly pretty obvious that views of Russia are relatively favorable among some on the right [1].
> Russia has increasingly less influence or power over the world.
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.
They have nuclear bombs. A lot of them. And the person who controls them has little to lose in using them. So we have to be nice and keep that person happy.
That's diplomacy? That does not mean that high officials and the richest people in the world bought Russia's propaganda machine, if any, or worse, get bought by Russia, right?
Well the side effect of everyone playing nice with Putin is that he's most likely a multi-billionaire, possibly even in the top 10 richest in the world.
That actually looks like forcing their view, censoring you just because they might not like your position. Useful, you cannot do a thing. Your comment is simply gone. I might wanted to save it, but it’s no longer.
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.
That's just not true. If Telegram wanted it a small amount, and xAI wanted it a large amount, it would be normal for Telegram to negotiate to get paid for doing it.
This isn't quite the framing I'd use—the key thing that would make it make sense for the deal to go this way is if there's competition bidding for the slot. Say OpenAI also wants in and was willing to pay for it. Absent competition for the slot and assuming that Telegram actually wanted the deal, we'd expect to see at most a no-cost exchange.
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.
What if Telegram sees it as a $100m benefit but they know that it’s A $500m benefit to Grok. If you were in telegram’s shoes in that situation, would you just charge nothing, knowing that Grok would happily pay $300m?
