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.
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.
Admittedly, some of the uses in the article do sound useful. Time will tell
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.
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.
https://www.paypal.com/uk/webapps/mpp/invite/terms
It is a common way for businesses to acquire customers.
And to collect firefox user data. That't why firefox is always connected to e100.net.
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.
For xAI to pay Telegram... where does xAI get value back out of that? I guess we'll be seeing AI with ads soon?
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).
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."
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.
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.
[1] https://www.vanderbilt.edu/unity/2023/04/07/first-ever-vande...
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.
It's billionaires helping billionaires.
https://fortune.com/article/russian-president-vladimir-putin...
Because dang them, right?
The sources are still there though.
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.
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.
Grok relaying your queries to certain agencies won't add much, but it will be interesting to see what bias Grok will exhibit on Telegram.
He already has rockets, internet satellites, social platforms, he has the ears of the president and now he will probably have a backdoor to one of the most popular “encrypted” chat apps.
> Telegram’s largest market is India, which accounts for more than 20% of its userbase. Telegram also has a large amount of users in countries with heavy censorship and surveillance, such as Iran, Russia, and Uzbekistan. [1]
> Percentage of users via region: Asia 38%, Europe 27%, Latin America 21%, MEMA 8% [1]
It sure is valuable data - if you are a three letter agency. Not sure if it's valuable business data.
[1] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/telegram-statistics/
That citizens of those countries are allowed to use Telegram says something about the privacy it affords to them.
Similar things happened in other non-free coutries as well.
Also Telegram banned or shadowbanned serveral protest channels / bots during elections and when war began.
Durov serves kremlin as much as any other company that operates in Russia.
Signal isn't E2EE, given the security blunder in which private images from your gallery were sent to random contacts (which indicates a scary state management situation in the apps, this isn't easy to do). E2EE implies that you purposely send content to specific people which is encrypted, not that your app sends potentially embarrassing or intimate pictures to your boss behind your back. That blunder is unforgivable.
That just seems such a unreal claim. Telegram removed features like "people nearby" after its CEO was arrested in France. Who seriously believe that the kind of threats France establishment would employ on such a person could dwarf those of Russia establishment in term of bending the braves?
Unless there's legal protections, assume in your threat model any company has let their host government, maybe others, backdoor their offerings. It might have been willingly or forced. Police states like U.S. and Russia should be assumed to subvert any pprovider.
If they don't like that, they need to repeal the Patriot Act, ban requiring companies to attach black boxes to their internal systems, give companies immunity for publicly talking about court orders, require companies to disclose what data they give to the government, and let individuals know what was ordered after a period of time. Then, I might trust statements about what they do or don't share.
Also, if these bother you, try not to commit crimes.
That’s a wildly ignorant take, but it makes for a nice conspiracy theory if you make no effort at all to understand the legalities.
Different warrants authorise the collection and use of information for different purposes. FAA 702 warrants only authorise targeting non U.S. persons outside the United States for foreign intelligence purposes, where there is probable cause to believe the U.S. person is a foreign power or is an officer, employee, or agent of a foreign power.
The FBI has criminal investigation and counterterrorism functions which relate to persons in the U.S. and/or where there is no connection to a foreign power. They obviously need different warrants to authorize those activities.
For example, they use a different meaning for the Word "collect." Instead of interception and storage of data, collect means an analyst looked at it. So, they technically weren't collecting U.S. citizens' data if analysts hadn't looked at that specific data yet. Technically... based on a strange definition of collect.
They originally also said this was limited to terrorism. Later, data showed they were looking at many more crimes. They were also passing the data onto many agencies. They were told to use "parallel construction" to deceive people about how they got that data.
Finally, BULLRUN and ECI-classified level showed they were weakening U.S. security standards, but pretending to strengthen them, so they could attack U.S. systems in secret at any time. Per "Core Secrets," they were also having U.S. companies give them backdoor the FBI could "compel" them to make (somehow).
With all that, they were caught lying under oath repeatedly. They got criminal immunity for that, too. I don't believe one word they say at this point. I also assume they're doing the same things they repeatedly lied about before and for which they can't be prosecuted.
However, for the last couple years enshittification is in progress - it's not at Microsoft Teams levels yet, but they're really trying to get there, shoving more and more ads (third- and first-party both) into users' faces with increasing frequency.
I also agree with the sibling comment that Telegram is sadly the best chat app I've used not only for group chats but also for 1-to-1 chats.
Edit: there are paid emojis or stickers too, now that I think about it.
I'm curious as to why you say it was "never good for one-to-one private conversations". I've been using it for this exact thing for many years, and still find it the best option currently on the market for a variety of reasons (e.g. unlike Signal it doesn't limit the number of devices which are linked to the same account).
I just remember thinking, well this is dumb, and going back to Signal (Signal annoys me in other ways, requiring a single phone to be the "master" and other devices to be merely linked. I miss keybase, they had a great system including paper backups)
("@durov @grok No deal has been signed")
> True. Agreed in principle, but formalities are pending.
This is how I know I'm not cut out for business - because I just can't lie with total impunity. Like, how could you do a global, public announcement like this when there is no dry ink, and the other side obviously hasn't authorized you to announce, and feel literally zero shame ("formalities are pending", lol).
I feel like more and more one of the biggest requirements for success in business (not to mention politics) is just total shamelessness.
Lol, because it was Elon himself who called out Durov's original tweet with his "no deal has been signed" response. So obviously the agreement was not agreed upon yet.
Ironically this sounds just like Elon's infamous "funding secured" tweet. I'm tired of all these bullshitting bullshitters, and then the follow on of apologists.
Or maybe Elon is backpedaling after being hand-slapped by US of A administration for dealing with what they potentially consider to be unfriendly social media network.
I am going through 'Signal and Noise' by Nate Silver and, after dismissing it at first read, now I am starting to wonder if his attempt to categorize some people on how well they can predict things is onto something. The boorish bravado ( or at least a perception of it ) is clearly part of the requirement though. You simply cannot even register to people with all the noise around them.
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.
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://techcrunc...
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.
- Data to train on
- Being the first GenAI experience of users that then might associate this stuff with xAi branding.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.
I guess they are still rolling out the feature.
Revenue comes from ads and premium users and some minor sources.
I highly assume that the AI will be integrated in a way that you can mostly disable it or barely notice it if you aren't looking for it, like all the other paid or special features.
So many people never noticed stars, NFTS, a whole nft market, pay for messages, pay for groups, ... While using it ever day
edit: at least you can get it working, though
I also use much OSS software where I am not the product. If you disagree say why.
Take the war in Ukraines for example, the uncensored and real time updates you get in open Telegram channels make most intelligence agencies except for Five Eyes nations look regular.
This deal may be much bigger than it seems off the bat. The cohort of people using Telegram to exchange content is maybe the top 5% of the world in many important niches.
* https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ceqjq11202ro (xAI bought Twitter)
* https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/01/elon-musk... (Tesla bought solarcity)
Effectively, of course, Twitter and Solarcity went bankrupt. That's what really happened.
I hope the CxO's at companies realize this, and so realize that Musk's big plan for Twitter ("just fire everyone, keep collecting the income") had a slightly different outcome when put into practice: fire everyone, rehire half, get publicly shamed by important people refusing to go back, bankruptcy in 2 years, 5 months. In other words, since 2022 Musk lost 5 million per day, on average, for 2.5 years.
Let that sink in!
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-begs-advertisers-re...
Clearly it was about revenue, at least to an extent.
Demand for Tesla isn't permanently going anywhere just to make a few new Elon haters happy. I also don't like Musk, but I am not deluding myself like so many these days that Tesla is dead. Elon is much like a roach; he will survive nuclear Armageddon.
Nobody said it's dead. Just that the car part of the company, the stable part, is somewhere between being abused and neglected by Musk. While the self-driving part has no competitive advantage and the robotics part seems to have legitimate synergies with xAI.
Not so hilarious that it doesn't make me want to consider trying to convince all my circles to move to a community-run Matrix server or something though.
The only cheap way out for users is to generate noise. Clog up their systems with useless data.
Yes, it's some ̵r̵i̵c̵h̵ ̵R̵u̵s̵s̵i̵a̵n̵ ̵d̵u̵d̵e̵ ̵t̵r̵a̵d̵i̵n̵g̵ ̵w̵i̵t̵h̵ Russian president calling Elmo.
So yeah, it's almost certain that everything you ever put into Telegram is in Grok.
I agree about considering alternatives though.
This is just a clever way of saying they use TLS, which I would be shocked if any mainstream app is not using.
US based company will get access to the messaging of all russians/ukrainians/Iranians (with soldiers being very well represented), with the ability to run NLP and identify information of great importance to the NSA/DoD/CIA.
Imagine if AT&T routed all Americans' SMS/text messages to the Russian version of xAI, would you call this a bad deal for Russia or USA ????
xAI recently raised at an $80B valuation and it's highly debatable if it's actually worth that...and who knows if you'd ever actually have a liquidation event.
Bizarre that that's not the default and that it's actually an option at all.
This is a sensible default for most people. If it is no more, then settings can be changed.
When your name is out there in public channels things change. Just like with an email address
They pay for distribution and they likely believe they can later monetise this by sheer mass, roping people in Grok or offering professional paid services.
Telegram has in-app monetisation for 50 payment providers and more than hundred countries. They also have crypto but it is unrelated.
Also if someone still believes into the freedom of speech, Telegram was just banned in Vietnam this week when they refused bend the knee to the government. It aligns with Musk's ideology.
I think if you interact with non-tech-users, Signal is the go-to; Matrix has way too many thorns for normal users to put up with in comparison to the alternatives.
Also the whole "furries make the internets go" is not really that true. There are certainly many of us in tech fields but going to meets/cons the average furry is not working in technology. The whole "suspiciously wealthy furry" thing just arose from the divide between tech worker and retail worker within the community. Gotta remember that most furries are like 16-25. Many tend to drop out or leave the community over 30-40 or so.
So what's the valuation for that equity?
Not really. It’s what people repeat over and over by ignorance, but it is popular because it has the best UX for a messaging app.
Encrypted chats exist but are opt in and nobody is using them.
could be used for spying purposes, if xAI can analyze telegram chats and identify texts of interest to the next-get USA military industrial complex (SpaceX, Palantir, Anduril, etc)
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).
I don't think you're wrong in any way. I've been in denial for the past few years because the world is going crazy with AI and politics. But it's actually very good for me because I'm shunning all that shit and I focus on local people and local problems more: taking care of the finances of a non-profit, being more available for my friends and relatives, solving actual problems that people may have, etc. Denial is great and it makes more active. The downside is that I now have the calendar of a CEO and less time for me, but I believe the world need some care and we all can do something about it by doing small stuff.
Now add in the fact that these decision makers are often openly avaricious egomaniacs who don't even make symbolic efforts help the poor and vulnerable, that narrows the scope of their spending to wasteful, sometimes outright harmful investments.
> Enormous amounts of money have accrued to a tiny proportion of humanity in the past 30 or so years. There is no way there wouldn't be tons of waste when spending decisions are made by so few people.
30 or so? So Reagan and Bush I somehow get a pass? It's literally still the same people and their stupid children.
What looks like irrational exuberance to sceptics is a perfectly reasonable attempt to not miss out on the next "iPhone moment" by the believers.
It doesn't matter because for such an industry-wide hype, there are no consequences for being wrong. If a CEO ignores AI and it does become the next iPhone moment, they'll be deposed in short order. If "everyone" is wrong and nothing comes off AI, they'll write off some investments, write some "What we learned" LinkedIn posts, and carry on. Our existing framework has no incentives to correct or innoculate agaisnt hypes led by the management/capital classes
The end result being all of us suffers in some way for the greed of a handful.
It is funny seing xAI, the trash-tier AI company, integrate with Telegram, the trash-tier messaging service.
> products that look like solutions to other executives but that don't solve any problems problems people in the real world
There are a variety of reasons why a company might begin to over-incentivize short-term gain (or high-stakes risk-taking) at the expense of customer happiness and possibly to the detriment of the company's long-term interests.
For example: Growth stagnation, an existential threat, a pessimistic long-term financial outlook, bad reward structure, low customer regard, organizational infighting, low employee retention, etc.
The sudden emergence of AI and volatile economy are triggering several of those for a boat load of companies. And, well, show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.
That's dollars not billion dollars, because google's AI summary was referring to some scam coin which has a total marketcap of a big mac and fries plus or minus. It seems now to have updated to refer to the messaging app and _their_ (probably also scam)coin.
You CAN disable them. Append -ai to your Google search query. You're welcome.
Edit: curious why are people downvoting a helpful workaround?
Firefox: `Edit > Settings > Search > Add`, then set as default
This also disables Google's automatic product search mode that sometimes triggers.
Of course there are hacks round it, but ultimately Google want us to have the AI summaries, don't care about user choice, and the best course of action is to change search engine.
"Genuine user interest doesn't come close to justifying their insane valuations" - classic HN copium
So tonight I'm gonna party like it's 1999
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.
What I could find is that iPhone users get it for free regardless:
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.
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
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?
Just with access to the feeds from X, Grok is already sometimes quite handy for checking some latest developments.
"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?"
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.
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.
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.
I do struggle with the 1 billion users, but I also don't believe that X has 600 million users actual users.
> 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
This statement is baking in a lot of personal convictions, even if they feel self-evident. Telegram has a billion users and not everyone one of them will share those views. This setup is a lot closer to Google paying Apple and Mozilla to be the default search engine than some desperate attempt to get people to play with your toys.
a quick google search shown Telegram have 1 billion users worldwide.
>X/xAI/Musk’s brand is toxic
Is it?
Yes.
0. Symmetric gigabit fiber Internet remains the gold standard, where one can get it, but unfortunately that's not many places.
1. I hope these companies are at least looking into doing these, as it's adjacent to their current products.
"The public doesn't care who the CEO is" is certifiably not true for Musk ventures, and Musk exploited that brand value in the past positively. The inauguration Seig Heil, and the subsequent DOGE misadventures are the other side of that "personal brand" coin, which very much exists for this CEO.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tesla-just-got-overtaken-euro...
VW did not sell three times as many EVs as Tesla. https://www.carscoops.com/2025/04/vw-finally-beats-tesla-out...
In many of the comparisons, they try to make it more dramatic than it really is by saying volkswagen as an entire brand sold X more than tesla. Well of course they did, they sell hybrids and ICE vehicles too.
> Tesla is nowhere near the top in Europe anymore.
This is factually incorrect. They are #2 overall BEV sales in europe for Q1 2025 and also own #1 and #2 spots for best selling BEV models.
I would expect such a low quality comment from reddit, not HN, but alas here we are in 2025.
And additional reminder for folks that have an axe to grind that perhaps clouds their judgement of reality: when you've dominated the BEV market for almost 10 years, going sideways and down in marketshare is pretty much the only option.
Maybe in the US where they are protected from Chinese competition. Tesla's fall in Europe has been precipitous, falling by more than 50% YoY. BYD sales overtook Tesla for the first time ever in the last quarter in Western Europe.
And Google basically invented LLM tech.
ChatGPT is really wussified. I tried to edit a fence from a picture of my son hitting a baseball and it was flagged as violent content.
From a business context, i wouldn’t put my customers data anywhere near grok.
Incidentally, have you got a moment to talk about the white genocide in south africa?
Is this some sort of joke, or are you genuinely wanting to discuss what's happening here in South Africa?
If it's a joke, I think it's in very poor taste at the expense of a persecuted minority. I have seen it, experienced it, and know full well how real it is, no matter how much social-media pushes it one way or the other.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/may/14/elon-musk...
OP is using it as an example of mismanagement.
Not the most polite way to discuss a genocide, or at the very least an absolutely dire situation.
It's as polite way as using the word genocide to describe the experience of white people in South Africa today merits.
I can only reiterate the parent's recommendation to you.
Stages currently active in SA: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6. Some people claim that the high murder rate among white SA'ns means they're also in stage 8/9, but actually the murder rate among black SA'ns is even higher.
There's no genocide, but there's a whole lot of red flags and generally terrible things. Just because Trump believes something does not make it wrong.
From elsewhere on that site: "Dr. Gregory Stanton, Founding President of Genocide Watch, warned that early warnings of genocide are still deep in South African society, though genocide has not begun."
There are countless examples of early warnings. Here are a couple:
- Former president of SA sings "bring my machine gun" song at ruling party conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFIobjP3xAI
- Same guy singing "kill the Boer": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JNc7SLUE1g
Many similar statements have been made by other politicians, among them Julius Malema, who collectively represent a large part of SA's population, over the course of many years.
Don't respond to something like this with a flippant statement about clutching your pearls.
Actually, genocide watch says only stage 6 is present in SA. https://www.genocidewatch.com/country-pages/south-africa
For comparison they list 3 different signs for an active genocide against black americans.
There are rumours of this but if it's true, these militias must be very secret indeed.
One problem is that violent criminals run rampant and the state seemingly has little desire to stop them, and zero capacity to do so. Meanwhile prominent politicians sing songs whose lyrics include machine gun sounds and calls for the murder of whites.
Parallel to this, there are job restrictions limiting the maximum number of whites companies may employ or promote. Franchises limit the number of white owners. White business owners are strong-armed through law and government contracts to give up some of their equity. There's regular talk about seizing white-owned property.
Whatever label you want to put on all that, I think the it's fucked up.
The worst part is, the average poor black South African is innocent in all this and now has to live in a place with a spiraling economy, power & water outages, even worse crime than the whites have to face, terrible standards of education, and much more.
This isn't true. As the genocide watch page says "The process is not linear."
White South Africans are less likely to be victims of crime, make more money, live longer, and are over-represented among corporate and political leadership. Taking steps to undo the damage done by apartheid isn't fucked up, it's necessary as evidenced by the aforementioned inequalities.
> "Taking steps to undo the damage ... it's necessary"
What a bullshit argument.
How does any of that help "undo" the damage done by apartheid? The government of SA prizes ideology over outcome. The ideology is to attack Western things, even if the outcome is that black South Africans are now very much worse off than they would've been if SA was thriving.
And to cite this as a defence for the abuses and outrages that has literally landed white SA'ns - despite their relative wealth - on a genocide watch.
I trust genocide watch more than you to determine which of the genocide watch stages of genocide are underway,
>How does any of that help "undo" the damage done by apartheid?
White South Africans make up 8% of the population but own 72% of farmland. This is a direct result of apartheid and colonial racism more broadly. Expropriating some of this land and returning it to black South Africans is directly undoing this damage.
Thank you. This is all that needs to be said on this subject.
The word genocide does not mean "a lot of red flags and generally terrible things", nor was it made to describe that.
>Don't respond to something like this with a flippant statement about clutching your pearls.
Don't clutch pearls then.
As long as you keep abusing the word "genocide" to apply it to the plight of white people in South Africa, you'll get the response you think is flippant, and I consider to be insufficiently stern given the harm and disrespect of such usage.
Saying this as a Jew whose family members were killed by the Nazis during WW2, by the way.
They were KIA as soldiers, so I'm hesitant to label them as victims of genocide, even though they were certainly the target of it — out of respect both to them, and those who didn't get a chance to die fighting.
You don't get to call a demand for respect flippant.
No? There are tons of completely insane things happening in SA, and much that needs to be said and done. If you're saying the minimum threshold for caring about what happens in other countries is actual genocide, then I disagree with you.
People have been incorrectly calling this a genocide for a long time, which is why the PDF from Genocide Watch dates back to 2015.
On the right you have people trying to make this even worse than it is, and on the left you have people trying to ignore it, or minimize it.
I'm not saying that.
The subject at hand is whether there's a "white genocide" taking place, and that subject is summed up in a single word: no.
>People have been incorrectly calling this a genocide for a long time
Which is why it's important to not perputate this harmful falsehood any further.
>on the left you have people trying to ignore it, or minimize it.
By using the term genocide where it's not applicable, you're actively minimizing the actual genocides that have taken place (or are taking place) — and by extension, you're complicit in minimizing the very issue you're discussing.
See, we both agree that whatever is taking place in South Africa is not as bad as an actual genocide.
But by using the word "genocide" in conjunction with it, you're diluting the meaning of the word reserved for the absolute extreme — you're helping spread the notion that genocide doesn't have to be that bad; that "red flags and terrible things" fits under the something sort of kind of like genocide label.
What we have in the end is the parable of the boy who cried genocide [1].
The point of the parable isn't that there's no threat of a wolf attack, nor that is shouldn't be seriously considered.
Main difference now is that the worst version is the only one being sold.
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
The hype bubble might mean they're commodities with a negative price for a little while.
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.
(while in theory they can be run locally, in practice this is rare)
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.
Hacker news users will consistently use the dumbest arguments to try and poo-poo AI.
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.
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.
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
Google pays Mozilla for a spot in Firefox.
This is nothing like the Google Mozilla (or Googlge Apple or Google whoever) deal.
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?"
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
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.
“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…
Otherwise it's not yiffing, it's just sex. Probably more prevalent among furries given that we have a higher ratio of queer people than wider society, and we're all mostly more open about sex. Straight non-furs are comparatively Catholic in their relations.
Boy that tracks. The shadiest AI model provider paying the shadiest chat app provider to integrate the racist slop machine into the scam and CSAM distribution machine.
xAI engineers, I genuinely hope you get the bag soon and switch jobs back into a reputable AI lab.
I’d prefer Signal but the story for backups on iOS is still a mess, and nobody wants to deal with it.
Sueprising they thought thst 300M was enough. I think they seriously underestimate how Musk's name is perceived in the EU, for example.
Congrats everyone.
Wtf is this argument even about? Knife is advantageous for robbers. Phone calls are advantageous for scammers.
Your existence is advantageous for many malicious agents.
So what?
WhatsApp is better even if you don't like Zuckerberg. I may not trust Zuck, but I trust a Russian dude and Musk a lot less.
For instance, Telegram’s founder was recently arrested in France for failing to adequately remove malware, scam, and CSAM from the platform. It was only after his arrest that Telegram began to take moderation seriously, although their efforts remain woefully inadequate.
Meanwhile pedos are actually just on Facebook and Instagram and not even hiding: https://www.wsj.com/tech/instagram-vast-pedophile-network-4a...
Integration into telegram chats seems like a natural extension to the data xAI gets from Twitter.
$40 billion for twitter is a steal in retrospect now that we've entered an era of insatiable appetite for training data.
How so, when they could have paid around $300M for the data?
Telegram may even be more valuable in terms of conversations, because Twitter data has very low signal:noise ratio - such as replies whose entirity are 3-word sentences or just emojis
Elon's election-buying effort was certainly assisted by the Twitter purchase. And look how few (formerly) blue checks have left the platform despite his antics.