Telegram CEO Pavel Durov on Wednesday said Elon Musk's AI company, xAI, is investing $300 million worth of cash and equity in the chat app.
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If this is something their users actually wanted, they'd be paying xAI, not the other way around.
By therealpygon 2025-05-2912:031 reply 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.
By dkkergoog 2025-05-2917:04 [dead]
By splatter9859 2025-05-2820:061 reply Never usually is with Musk and his platforms. Both X and Tesla's software stack clearly show this readily. He has other purposes in mind.
By serial_dev 2025-05-2820:301 reply 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.
Maybe not. But how much are they going to make by spending these 300 million USD ?
By therealpygon 2025-05-2912:03 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.
By colordrops 2025-05-2820:592 reply 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.
By littlestymaar 2025-05-2821:241 reply 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.
By MonkeyClub 2025-05-298:37 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.
By bratwurst3000 2025-06-0611:20 yes telegram user need a conspiracy theory friendly chatbot and grok needs users… win win win
By prettyblocks 2025-05-2821:053 reply As a Telegram user, I don't mind having an interface to Grok that is outside of X.
Isn't that grok.com? There is also a grok iOS and Android app (though the Android app is apparently a bit of a 2nd class citizen)
Admittedly, some of the uses in the article do sound useful. Time will tell
By csomar 2025-05-299:08 That must be new because a few months ago I wanted to give it a try and the only option was to have a Twitter account.
I agree with you.
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.
By prettyblocks 2025-05-2913:57 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.
By piyuv 2025-05-2823:53 [flagged]
By nickpsecurity 2025-05-2819:552 reply 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.
By akurtzhs 2025-05-2820:52 Paypal paid people to open an account or to refer new accounts early on. Inspired Dropbox to do the same thing with free storage.
By edent 2025-05-2821:13 PayPal still regularly send out offers which pay new users.
https://www.paypal.com/uk/webapps/mpp/invite/terms
It is a common way for businesses to acquire customers.
How do you PayPal straight up paying people to use their platform worked out?
By nickpsecurity 2025-05-292:10 It's market cap was recently $69.51 billion. I'll add the eBay partnership to the reasons for its long-term success.
By bko 2025-05-2910:16 Google pays apple to be their default search. Do you believe apple users don’t want google to be their default search?
Maybe xAI has some interesting way to make money in other places, like Google paying Mozilla for making Google search the default choice.
By zinglersen 2025-05-2818:42 It's the same reason for Google and xAI - they want user data and are more than happy to pay for it.
Google is paying Mozilla to keep Firefox on life support - so that they can pretend Chrome has competitors
By hulitu 2025-05-297:42 > 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.
By malfist 2025-05-2821:34 The case hasn't been decided yet
By nerbert 2025-05-2819:41 Directly taken from Gate's book.
By selcuka 2025-05-290:05 > 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.
By throw05678931 2025-05-291:191 reply A pretty clear admission that Twitter failed as a distribution channel.
By A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 2025-05-297:17 Or.. an understanding that not all users reside in the same silos.
Google pays Apple some 20 billion a year for search primacy on iphones
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.
By midnitewarrior 2025-05-293:35 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.
By blitzar 2025-05-297:04 If it turns out to be something actually useful, everyone else will start doing it for $0.
By Barrin92 2025-05-2822:09 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.
By roycebranning 2025-05-290:25 if users specifically wanted Grok, yes. if they generally want AI, no.
By hiddencost 2025-05-2818:251 reply Like Google with Apple?
Google 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?
By spacebanana7 2025-05-2818:514 reply 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).
By harmmonica 2025-05-2820:211 reply 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."
By spacebanana7 2025-05-2820:38 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.
By s900mhz 2025-05-2819:11 Perplexity basically has this right? They let you buy things with a button in the chat itself!
By jbverschoor 2025-05-2819:56 Will? Are :)
By dmonitor 2025-05-2820:19 ..and Honey will snipe their commission anyway
By siriusfeynman 2025-05-2820:18 Already here with google's ADK (agent development kit)
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.
By aaron695 2025-05-2823:57 [dead]
By cosmic_cheese 2025-05-2819:43 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).
By alterom 2025-05-299:27 What game?
Is it "making a meaningful statement" or "citing sources for claims"?
Not like you're playing either game, so it's hard to guess.
By Geee 2025-05-2819:44 [flagged]
Why I’m not surprised you’re downvoted to hell? Yet your post provides plenty of evidence for those who happen to not know all this for some reason.
By alterom 2025-05-2821:34 [flagged]
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.
By matthewdgreen 2025-05-2819:00 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].
[1] https://www.vanderbilt.edu/unity/2023/04/07/first-ever-vande...
By apercu 2025-05-2819:27 > 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.
It's billionaires helping billionaires.
There's a massive jump from "multi-billiojare#" to "120 billion" (10th richest).
By jedberg 2025-05-291:05 Fortune (who makes the list) estimates him at $200 billion.
https://fortune.com/article/russian-president-vladimir-putin...
By Krasnol 2025-05-2818:45 It's not "Russia's influence", It's the influence of a few but very rich Russian individuals.
> This is not a sentence in English.
> I'll be here at day.
i hate to heckle, but... :)
By alterom 2025-05-2821:28 Heckling deserved :)
I'll be here all day, using flow typing on my phone :)
You cited your sources, but they are flagged and removed :)
Because dang them, right?
HN (and the mods) seem to hate nothing more than a well-sourced, well-structured long comment.
The sources are still there though.
By wltr 2025-05-2913:46 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.
By wltr 2025-05-2819:15 [flagged]
By capyba 2025-05-290:31 [flagged]
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.
By brookst 2025-05-290:06 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?
Given the use in conflict zones and the prevalence of military bloggers from all sides, Telegram is already one of the most surveilled apps out there.
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.
By serial_dev 2025-05-2820:37 It’s his play to be an even more important part of the military industrial complex and the surveillance state.
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.
By rodgerd 2025-05-291:09 I imagine Telegram-based training data will bias Grok to reflect Musk's own views more reliably than any other platform out there.
> Telegram is the most popular messaging app in Iran and Uzbekistan [1]
> 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/
> Telegram also has a large amount of users in countries with heavy censorship and surveillance
That citizens of those countries are allowed to use Telegram says something about the privacy it affords to them.
By tdiff 2025-05-2818:43 Its well known that whatsapp is also available in Russia
By machomaster 2025-05-2819:013 reply You don't know what you are talking about. Read on the multi-year attempts of Putin trying to ban Telegram and Telegram fighting back (technologically and also politically - demonstrations, etc). Telegram won the battle and Putin had no choice but to admit defeat.
Similar things happened in other non-free coutries as well.
Telegram dont have E2EE by default. It's all you need to know. 99% of communications on Telegram are in plain text.
Also Telegram banned or shadowbanned serveral protest channels / bots during elections and when war began.
By greenavocado 2025-05-2820:492 reply Many Telegram groups are only Play Store banned or banned access is restricted based on the user's phone number. This is why you must install the APK from their website directly instead of using an App Store version.
This have nothing to do with Apple. One of largest anti-war public channels in Russia by relatives of mobilized people was marked as "FAKE" for a very long time by Durov's personal decision.
Durov serves kremlin as much as any other company that operates in Russia.
By greenavocado 2025-05-2919:441 reply It absolutely does have everything to do with Apple. Groups are not only marked "FAKE," they are completely banned for the App Store app users.
By greenavocado 2025-05-2920:19 Most channels are banned by App Stores, and not by Durov. What is your point?
By codedokode 2025-05-2823:41 It is ridiculous that Apple decides what Telegram users can or cannot see, especially banning harmless things like nudity but allowing cruel things like war videos or propaganda.
WhatsApp isn't E2EE by default either, since default flow pushes you to backup your key to Google Drive.
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.
By areyourllySorry 2025-05-2820:49 i think we have different definitions of e2ee.
By psychoslave 2025-05-2821:131 reply >Telegram won the battle and Putin had no choice but to admit defeat.
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?
By codedokode 2025-05-2823:43 You should not forget that before creating Telegram Durov was the head of VK and he left it to the government with all data, photos (including deleted ones) and messages.
By nickpsecurity 2025-05-2820:021 reply I'll warn that the FBI was publicly trying to get warrants for information while they and NSA were siphoning it off in secret from the same companies. One was likely a cover for the other.
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.
By bigfatkitten 2025-05-2821:201 reply > I'll warn that the FBI was publicly trying to get warrants for information while they and NSA were siphoning it off in secret from the same companies. One was likely a cover for the other
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.
By nickpsecurity 2025-05-2823:38 That's what they said before the Snowden leaks. The Snowden leaks and latter revelations showed they were lying.
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.
Unfortunately it's also the most sleek and feature-rich messenger of them all :(
By acjohnson55 2025-05-2820:53 I agree. I need to migrate off, but I haven't figured out where to yet.
It sort of used to be, although not exactly as a messenger - it was never good for one-to-one private conversations, but as a social network with channels and groups.
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.
What ads is Telegram showing? I can't think of any, except a peristent birthday reminder.
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.
By codedokode 2025-05-290:081 reply There is humble text ads in public channels. There is no ads in 1v1 or group chats so you probably just didn't see it.
By distances 2025-05-296:38 I see, I haven't seen these as I'm indeed not interested in using a chat app for public channels.
By thunderfork 2025-05-2823:50 [dead]
Since the protocol is actually open, you don't have to use the official client.
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).
By jazzyjackson 2025-05-2822:18 I wasn't a telegram user for long so this may have changed but isn't the secret chat limited to device to device? So messages sent from my phone can't be decrypted by the same user account on my laptop?
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)
By greenavocado 2025-05-2820:50 The main Telegram enshittification is caused by spammers and scammers. They purchase lots of Telegram Premium credits and proceed to spam the hell out of users and they get away with it. Telegram Premium users are treated much more leniently than regular users when it comes to moderation affairs.
By CaramelRaisins 2025-05-2818:491 reply How many times are you going to repost this?
By alterom 2025-05-2818:56 [flagged]
