4 ms·

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

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.

z3dd 1y ago
oh, cause telegram is not a chat app, it's Facebook of eastern Europe
- game_the0ry 1y ago
  And how is the data of Eastern Europe as valuable as xAI is paying for it?
  - alterom 1y ago
    [flagged]
  - ZeroTalent 1y ago
    $300M is not a lot of money in this situation
  - XorNot 1y ago
    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).
- bearjaws 1y ago
  Used pretty heavily by island nations and LATAM.
alterom 1y ago
[dead]
- karn97 1y ago
  [flagged]
anbr 1y ago
intelligence gathering
- verdverm 1y ago
  thought policing and influencing The value is in manipulation, not monies
arizen 1y ago
Chat app with 1B+ users
ben_w 1y ago
> 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://techcrunch.com/2021/03/23/telegram-raises-150m-from-mubadala-and-abu-dhabi-cp-via-pre-ipo-convertible-bonds/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210323132059/https://techcrunc...
- pier25 1y ago
  TIL Telegram has like 1 billion users.
  - miohtama 1y ago
    It has more users. 1B is monthly active if I recall correctly.
cowpig 1y ago
Seems fairly obvious that Musk's strategy is to monetize political influence, isn't it? It's just advertising but a leap darker
top_sigrid 1y ago
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.
didibus 1y ago
- Data to train on - Being the first GenAI experience of users that then might associate this stuff with xAi branding.
- beAbU 1y ago
  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.
  - throwaway290 1y ago
    Where is LLM in my whatsapp? Never seen it, latest version.
    - beAbU 1y ago
      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.
felipeerias 1y ago
Nothing is more valuable for an AI company than exclusive access to large amounts of human-generated data.
rasz 1y ago
$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

z3dd 1y ago

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

game_the0ry 1y ago
And how is the data of Eastern Europe as valuable as xAI is paying for it?
- alterom 1y ago
  [flagged]
- ZeroTalent 1y ago
  $300M is not a lot of money in this situation
- XorNot 1y ago
  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).
bearjaws 1y ago
Used pretty heavily by island nations and LATAM.

alterom 1y ago

[dead]

karn97 1y ago
[flagged]

anbr 1y ago

intelligence gathering

verdverm 1y ago
thought policing and influencing The value is in manipulation, not monies

arizen 1y ago

Chat app with 1B+ users

ben_w 1y ago

> 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://techcrunch.com/2021/03/23/telegram-raises-150m-from-mubadala-and-abu-dhabi-cp-via-pre-ipo-convertible-bonds/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210323132059/https://techcrunc...

pier25 1y ago
TIL Telegram has like 1 billion users.
- miohtama 1y ago
  It has more users. 1B is monthly active if I recall correctly.

cowpig 1y ago

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

top_sigrid 1y ago

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.

didibus 1y ago

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

beAbU 1y ago
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.
- throwaway290 1y ago
  Where is LLM in my whatsapp? Never seen it, latest version.
  - beAbU 1y ago
    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.

felipeerias 1y ago

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

rasz 1y ago

$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