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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?
by afavour 1y ago
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?
- apercu 1y agoCompletely agree, but another way to look at it is that Elmo is using someone else's money anyway...
- fallingknife 1y agoDoesn't feel much different than Google paying for being the default in browsers
- toomuchtodo 1y agoNo different. It is an attempt to prime the pump to stoke valuations. The product is the stock price go up, the illusion of value creation is the work. "Please Use." If people aren't paying for it, and you have to pay them to use it, what is the value? Russ Hanneman Silicon Valley pre revenue rant meme here
- swyx 1y agoi get what youre saying but there are impt differences: 1) search is much cheaper to serve than chat 2) chat is a less frequent usecase 3) google paid for entry into a locked ecosystem (apple. also to appear like they are not a monopoly). telegram is far from locked.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- fhd2 1y ago4) Search already has working monetisation through ads. They can acquire users at profit, as opposed to at a loss.
- guywithahat 1y agoYeah but chat results in paid subscriptions and it disincentives telegram from creating their own AI chat. Google also pays for most browsers and other ecosystems which aren't really considered "locked"
- bognition 1y agoModels are only as good as the data that is fed into them. OpenAI is paying Reddit 70M for access to the data. So the real value here is the conversations, not the model. And in the case of Telegram, you will get very intimate data about people. You know in real time who they are talking to, what they are talking about, etc... Its extremely valuable data
- jpalomaki 1y agoIn certain countries Telegram channels also seem to be a very popular news source. Just with access to the feeds from X, Grok is already sometimes quite handy for checking some latest developments.
- jermaustin1 1y agoI think this is more the case. xAI is looking for more data to ingest. I'm not sure how the integration will work with Telegram if the contents are supposed to be "secure". Are you just allowing your conversation to get exfiltrated to xAI? Does the other party you are talking to get a say in that?
- jsheard 1y agoIt's the next logical step after companies shoving AI into every corner of their own products regardless of whether their users want it - now they're paying other companies to shove AI things into their products regardless of whether their users want it. Genuine user interest doesn't come close to justifying their insane valuations so they have to put their thumb on the scale by shoving it everyones face and then pretending that's the same thing. See also: Googles AI summaries, which always get top billing so they can tally nearly every search up as an "AI engagement" regardless of user intent, and can't be disabled because that would get in the way of what's clearly the actual goal (to juice the AI metrics as hard as possible, user experience be damned).
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago>Googles AI summaries, which are pinned to the top of results and can't be disabled You CAN disable them. Append -ai to your Google search query. You're welcome. Edit: curious why are people downvoting a helpful workaround?
- rcoveson 1y agoHuge oversight by Google. Now they're going to have to invent some other way to indicate that you want to show hidden search results and inodes.
- input_sh 1y agoThat's not disabling it, that's a funky workaround that happens to work for now.
- Arnavion 1y agoWonder if DDG can be convinced to append that automatically for !g queries...
- blibble 1y agoI've got a violentmonkey script to redirect any google.com query to the non-AI version (unfortunately not on this PC else I'd paste it)
- pjc50 1y agoTime for some no-evidence conspiracy theory: the API-based "AI"s are surveillance vectors, so this is just cover for running all your conversations through a tool to determine which ones to report to which authorities. (while in theory they can be run locally, in practice this is rare)
- alterom 1y ago[flagged]
- linkage 1y agoNo matter how good your offering is, you always need marketing if you are competing against an established behemoth in the space like OpenAI. Even Google has been unable to make much of a dent in OpenAI's daily active users despite having superior distribution and (recently) comparable quality. Grok 3 is legitimately one of the best general purpose models out there. People don't know about it because ChatGPT is "good enough". And people have no reason to care unless Grok 3 is 5x better or ships a feature that goes viral like Ghibli portraits.
- afavour 1y ago$300m could buy you a hell of a lot of marketing, no? Then people could choose to use your product rather than be forced to. We’re side stepping the elephant in the room: X/xAI/Musk’s brand is toxic and forcing the product onto users is one of few paths available.
- smeeth 1y agoIt did buy them a hell of a lot of marketing, Telegram has a billion users and those users are mostly in countries where Musk's brand isn't as toxic.
- mrweasel 1y agoIt's honestly a good fit. Telegram also doesn't have the best image, but people don't care, so it's highly likely that they also don't care about the image of XAI or Musk. I do struggle with the 1 billion users, but I also don't believe that X has 600 million users actual users.
- kjkjadksj 1y agoYou really believe 1/8th of the world is on telegram?
- overfeed 1y agoTelegram is ostensibly a competitor if you buy into Musk's pitch for X as an "everything app". Paying Telegram $300M instead of developing chat features and/or marketing proves that plans for the "everything app" are dead in the water, or perhaps were never sincere from the get go.
- bastardoperator 1y agoThis type of legalized data exfiltration doesn't come cheap.
- 98codes 1y agoAI models being "sold" into apps is the new version of Google paying to be the default search in web browsers. Main difference now is that the worst version is the only one being sold.
- asadotzler 1y agoMain difference is Google was paying a rev share, so both parties make bank off the deal, mostly Google. Here, there is no shared interest, just one company taking money from another for distribution with no financial return. Neither company has any incentive to make it work well.
- mylons 1y agoit's quite possible many model producers are trying to do this with telegram, and therefore there is a price for exclusivity?
- msgodel 1y agoLanguage models should all converge to something that's more or less identical. They're commodities. The hype bubble might mean they're commodities with a negative price for a little while.
- huevosabio 1y agoDepends on the monetization strategy. Google pays Apple a ton to be the search engine. But yea, if xAI isn't going for ads, this is a pretty bad sign.
- smeeth 1y agoI don't like Grok that much, but there's nothing particularly new or interesting about this deal. Telegram has a big international audience, it makes sense someone would pay to be the default for user adoption reasons. "Feels oh so telling that Google has to pay Apple and not the other way around. If Google search was so great wouldn't we all be clamoring for it to be the default search in Safari?"
- croes 1y agoGoogle does it to hinder competition, so it is telling.
- nemomarx 1y agopeople go out of their way to install chrome but don't go out of their way to change away from Bing search as much, su that seems correct to me.
- rurp 1y agoThe Google Search deal seems like a much more defensible business decision to me for a couple reasons. For starters Google gets revenue almost every single time that search integration is used so there is a direct return on the investment. What's the conversion rate for a paid Grok account? It might turn out to be terribly low and $300M is a substantial amount of money. I doubt a normal company without Elon's vast wealth network that needs to actually make money would gamble on a deal like this. The other reason is that the Apple deal is a big part of maintaining Google's search monopoly. Owning a tech monopoly is vastly more valuable than competing in a crowded market so locking down market share to achieve that can be worth spending more per user than their median value. Grok isn't even in the ballpark of an LLM monopoly so those benefits don't apply in their case.
- Tycho 1y agoSame as OpenAI paying Apple to integrate ChatGPT with Siri/iPhone. Apple has the users. As does Telegram. Of course, non-paying users are a loss-leader, but some portion of them will convert to premium users. They’re paying for distribution. And maybe mindshare.
- Handy-Man 1y agoOpenAI is not paying Apple though. Only money exchange that happens is the cut Apple takes of the subscriptions.
- Tycho 1y agoBut then I suppose it’s also payment-in-kind if they are serving the (non-premium) iPhone requests for free.
- hu3 1y agoCould you share a source for the OpenAI deal? What I could find is that iPhone users get it for free regardless: https://openai.com/index/openai-and-apple-announce-partnership/ https://openai.com/index/openai-and-apple-announce-partnersh... > The ChatGPT integration, powered by GPT‑4o, will come to iOS, iPadOS, and macOS later this year. Users can access it for free without creating an account, and ChatGPT subscribers can connect their accounts and access paid features right from these experiences.
- MaxPock 1y agoOr Google paying Apple 20 billion dollars to be the default search engine in Apple devices
- alterom 1y ago[flagged]
- abrahadabra 1y agoDurov is also a citizen of France and the UAE.
- dmix 1y agoHow is it different than Google paying Firefox?
- hirako2000 1y agoThat's different as X is buying a form of exclusivity there. Paying a browser to become the default search engine is just to serve first. And, there is the argument users are not asking for, nor want Ai features, I bet most don't want it. They just want to chat, with humans that is. They are inserting Ai everywhere they can, not to rank up their product as the kind of product people are looking for, against those of the competitors. A browser without a default search engine is a downgrade for everyone. Although it would be more ethical if it simply prompted for which to default to. One could point at it and see an issue, but that's pretty different.
- nitwit005 1y agoMost users would probably use Google by default if forced to pick on install. Google is effectively paying so that their competitors like Microsoft won't sign their own deal and become the default Firefox search instead.
- xyst 1y agoIt’s training data. That’s all that Felon wants.
- moralestapia 1y agoFlawed logic. Google pays Mozilla for a spot in Firefox.
- asadotzler 1y agoGoogle pays Mozilla a fraction of the money Goggle makes from ad clicks driven by Firefox, a revenue sharing agreement. Where's xAI's 80:20 split here? Where's the default AI interface in Telegram that users would fill with some other AI service if Telegram wasn't getting paid for the distribution? Where's the user expectation of AI in the product in the first place. This is nothing like the Google Mozilla (or Googlge Apple or Google whoever) deal.
- moralestapia 1y ago*sigh* Let's see if this helps you grasp it ... "Feels oh so telling that Google has to pay Mozilla and not the other way around. If these offerings were so great wouldn't we all be clamoring for it?"
- aresant 1y agoNot sure that's the right way to look at it Premium Telegram users get to try for free, will move to a subscription model Telegram has 12m premium users up from 4m in 2023, and 1b+ users Not unreasonable to think a 5% take rate from just premium users at say $10/month extra Which - at 50% revenue share to GROK - would be a ~$36m a year run rate for Grok At $36m in this category of AI SaaS that's something like $400 - 500m in enterprise value out of the box
- antisthenes 1y agoI think this deal is more xAI buying advertising for Grok in Telegram.
- johnfn 1y agoGoogle paid Mozilla XB to keep Google as the default search engine, and Apple XXB. Does that mean that Google wasn't a good product?
- mrguyorama 1y agoGoogle didn't have to pay anyone back in 1999 or early 2000s. Google paying Mozilla and Apple to be the "standard" search engine absolutely means it is a bad product. IMO it's purely anticompetitive too, but I'm a competitive market radical. I feel similarly for how chrome didn't win by being "good", it won by being bundled, and by putting one click "Hey hey click here" buttons on google.com.
- dughnut 1y agoYes
- abletonlive 1y agoPlease tell us what you believe this is telling us. You’ve left it up to interpretation and this feels more like a Reddit quality comment than one that the hackernews community deserves. In my opinion, it’s telling us that competition in the LLM space is accelerating and it’s anybody’s game right now. It’s important enough of a space that companies are willing to pay for exposure and squeeze out the competition. I’ve interpreted your comment as “llm has no value so the providers are paying for people to use it”, which is, naive at best
- sefrost 1y agoThat's an interesting way of looking at it thanks for sharing. In that way it's similar to Google paying to be the default search engine in Firefox or on iOS. They _did_ have the best search engine at the time but they still paid platforms to have it embedded as a default option.
- diggan 1y ago> “llm has no value so the providers are paying for people to use it”, I feel like for that to have been even possible to understand from that comment, then "not the other way around" couldn't have been there. If authors opinion was that LLMs has no value, why'd Telegram pay to use Grok? Maybe I'm just used to reading between the lines, but I think parents comment strike a fine balance between saying too much, saying enough and saying too little. It's understandable what they mean, if you read the full comment. Not everything has to be explicitly spelled out for the lowest common denominator.
- abletonlive 1y agoThey pretty much did say “not the other way around” with “If these offerings were so great wouldn't we all be clamoring for it?” The entire question is flawed. It’s a rhetorical question and the implication is “these offerings are not so great and we aren’t clamoring for it”. I’d argue we are clamoring for it, and we have a lot of options here and they are all great options. But since the rhetorical question is flawed you now have nothing to anchor on to know exactly what OP meant because if they are flawed here that means whatever they meant in the first half of the comment is also likely flawed. Maybe you’re not as good at reading between the lines, or the line in general, as much as you think you are and you’re actually the LCD that would be served by a deeper comment. The whole point of the comment is that it is “telling” of something but the commenter at this point could come back and basically go in any direction. That’s an indication the comment is not saying enough…
- sidcool 1y agoIt's like Google paying Apple. Doesn't mean Google is bad, just means it needs the traffic and Apple has the reach.
- asadotzler 1y agoGoogle pays a rev share on the return it gets from the deal. This isn't pay and cross your fingers child's play here. Google makes most of the money for search transactions that click ads and the distributor, Apple, makes a small fraction of that for providing the search access points. Where's xAI's lucrative return here? Where's their 80:20 split?
- sidcool 1y agoEye balls, DAU and SuperGrok subscription. Also, data. It's a smart move. Also helps to get integration between X and Telegram.
- bobxmax 1y agoOr, y'know, there's a lot of AI vendors and Telegram doesn't need to pay for it because they have something to offer. Hacker news users will consistently use the dumbest arguments to try and poo-poo AI.