5 ms·
If this is something their users actually wanted, they'd be paying xAI, not the other way around.
by Suppafly 1y ago
If this is something their users actually wanted, they'd be paying xAI, not the other way around.
- Gothmog69 1y agoGoogle pays Apple some 20 billion a year for search primacy on iphones
- piyuv 1y agoThat 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.
- midnitewarrior 1y agoI 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.
- hiddencost 1y agoLike Google with Apple?
- eqvinox 1y agoGoogle pays Apple because Google has paying customers for that in their advertisers. For xAI to pay Telegram... where does xAI get value back out of that? I guess we'll be seeing AI with ads soon?
- spacebanana7 1y agoThat’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).
- s900mhz 1y agoPerplexity basically has this right? They let you buy things with a button in the chat itself!
- jbverschoor 1y agoWill? Are :)
- dmonitor 1y ago..and Honey will snipe their commission anyway https://fortune.com/2024/12/23/honey-extension-scam-drama/ https://fortune.com/2024/12/23/honey-extension-scam-drama/
- harmmonica 1y agoI 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."
- spacebanana7 1y agoI 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.
- siriusfeynman 1y agoAlready here with google's ADK (agent development kit) https://google.github.io/adk-docs/tools/built-in-tools/#google-search 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.
- alterom 1y ago[flagged]
- hintymad 1y agoI 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.
- alterom 1y ago[flagged]
- kurisufag 1y ago> This is not a sentence in English. > I'll be here at day. i hate to heckle, but... :)
- alterom 1y agoHeckling deserved :) I'll be here all day, using flow typing on my phone :)
- wltr 1y agoYou cited your sources, but they are flagged and removed :) Because dang them, right?
- alterom 1y agoHN (and the mods) seem to hate nothing more than a well-sourced, well-structured long comment. The sources are still there though.
- hintymad 1y agoMaybe xAI has some interesting way to make money in other places, like Google paying Mozilla for making Google search the default choice.
- zinglersen 1y agoIt's the same reason for Google and xAI - they want user data and are more than happy to pay for it.
- nikanj 1y agoGoogle is paying Mozilla to keep Firefox on life support - so that they can pretend Chrome has competitors
- nerbert 1y agoDirectly taken from Gate's book.
- throwanem 1y agoIs or was? They just lost that suit, didn't they?
- malfist 1y agoThe case hasn't been decided yet
- hulitu 1y ago> Google is paying Mozilla to keep Firefox on life support - so that they can pretend Chrome has competitors And to collect firefox user data. That't why firefox is always connected to e100.net.
- Hoasi 1y agoExactly, but what users want is not part of this equation.
- splatter9859 1y agoNever usually is with Musk and his platforms. Both X and Tesla's software stack clearly show this readily. He has other purposes in mind.
- serial_dev 1y agoI’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.
- dotcoma 1y agoMaybe not. But how much are they going to make by spending these 300 million USD ?
- colordrops 1y agoAre 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.
- littlestymaar 1y agoOr 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.
- MonkeyClub 1y ago
- nickpsecurity 1y agoI 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.
- rchaud 1y agoWhen 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.
- akurtzhs 1y agoPaypal paid people to open an account or to refer new accounts early on. Inspired Dropbox to do the same thing with free storage.
- edent 1y agoPayPal still regularly send out offers which pay new users. https://www.paypal.com/uk/webapps/mpp/invite/terms https://www.paypal.com/uk/webapps/mpp/invite/terms It is a common way for businesses to acquire customers.
- bag_boy 1y agoHow do you PayPal straight up paying people to use their platform worked out?
- nickpsecurity 1y ago
- Barrin92 1y agoI 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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- mquander 1y agoThat'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.
- lolinder 1y agoThis 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.
- brookst 1y agoWhat 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?
- aaron695 1y ago[dead]
- selcuka 1y ago> 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.
- roycebranning 1y agoif users specifically wanted Grok, yes. if they generally want AI, no.
- capyba 1y ago[flagged]
- throw05678931 1y agoA pretty clear admission that Twitter failed as a distribution channel.
- A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 1y agoOr.. an understanding that not all users reside in the same silos.
- blitzar 1y agoIf it turns out to be something actually useful, everyone else will start doing it for $0.
- bko 1y agoGoogle pays apple to be their default search. Do you believe apple users don’t want google to be their default search?
- therealpygon 1y agoExactly. 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.
- dkkergoog 1y ago[dead]