Telegram gets some AI integration but you may not love the source

• Telegram is adding xAI's Grok chatbot to its app
• Grok will be embedded into chat features like the search bar and pinned chats
• The deal has xAI paying Telegram $300 million to become a part of the app

Telegram messages will have a sarcastic extra presence now, thanks to a deal made by the messaging app to bring xAI’s Grok chatbot to its platform.

xAI’s flagship chatbot is known for a snarkier – and occasionally unhinged – approach to user interactions. That attitude will now be available to all users, having previously been limited to some premium Telegram users.

Telegram CEO Pavel Durov shared a video on X showing how users will be able to pin Grok to the top of chats, summon it from the search bar, and use it to do all sorts of activities; from writing messages and summarizing group chats to creating stickers, answering trivia, and even serving as a moderator in community groups.

Elon Musk’s AI company signed a deal with Telegram to embed Grok as a feature throughout the platform, paying $300 million for the privilege. Telegram is also getting 50% of the revenue from any Grok subscriptions purchased through the app, which could turn this into one of the most lucrative crossovers in chatbot history.

Grok at work

If this all sounds vaguely familiar, that’s because it sounds a lot like Meta's strategy for Meta AI. The AI assistant has become part of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp in a similar fashion to Grok in Telegram. Grok serves as Telegram’s answer to Meta AI, encouraging people to stay on the platform rather than look elsewhere for help from an AI source.

The $300 million being paid by xAI may sound over-the-top, but it makes sense when you consider what xAI gets out of it. Telegram is one of the most-used messaging apps on the planet. Getting even a fraction of the more than 900 million monthly active Telegram users to try Grok would be a massive boon for the chatbot. And that's not even considering the value of the data Grok will get from Telegram users. It's a massive pool of real-time interaction data, which could fuel Grok's development in ways xAI is eager to pursue.

Since the real power of AI data comes from how real people interact, $300 million might end up being a bargain. Grok can learn a lot from what hundreds of millions of people ask, how they phrase things, and what tone they use, depending on whether they're happy, mad, flirty, or confused. xAI now has a front-row seat to that data firehose.

Naturally, the Grok integration will raise a few eyebrows when questions of privacy, data ownership, and how our data is used are brought up. Neither xAI nor Telegram has provided much detail about how Grok will handle user data or whether any of that data will be used to further train the model, which one must assume will be the case.

Grok may become the helpful assistant it's pitched as, or it could be another feature that people Google how to turn off, just like Meta AI. There’s also the question of moderation.

Durov demonstrated how Grok might help clean up spammy group chats, but Grok's tone would likely clash with a Telegram group discussing sensitive issues, and things could go very wrong if Grok misinterprets the context in a heated argument.

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