Telegram and xAI do $300M Deal to Add Grok for 1B Users
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We have some breaking news on a partnership between XAI and Telegram to essentially integrate the Grok app into the Telegram app. And we've seen other players like Meta kind of doing this. This is, I think, an interesting new way. They've showed a couple of use cases. And there is some...

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All right, let's get into what's going on with XAI and Telegram. So I think the big news was reported over on X. Pavel Durov, who is the CEO of Telegram, said, this summer, Telegram users will gain access to the best AI technology on the market. Elon Musk and I have agreed to a one-year partnership to bring XAI's grok to our billion-plus users and integrate it across all Telegram apps. Okay, the first thing I think is interesting here is

This is a limited deal. It's not like they're, you know, it's going to be like the default model forever. This is a one-year deal. I think that's kind of smart because at this point, you know, these AI models are very competitive. And let's say Grok just couldn't keep up and it just kind of died after a certain amount of time that, you know, they couldn't.

make it as good as OpenAI. It was runaway success, and Grok just couldn't catch up. Telegram doesn't want to be stuck with that. They could do it for a year, but they probably don't want to do it for more. And if I'm being honest, Grok is my preferred model, so this is the one I probably use the most. I think it's got a ton of amazing updates. They're doing really good. They had reasoning models before Google did. I think somewhere between OpenAI, Grok, and Anthropic kind of duking it out for different use cases are the top three models. And each of them, I think...

I think it takes a moment where it steps up and is better. Grok had a moment when Grok 3 first came out where I thought it was better than ChatGPT. ChatGPT now has some cool tools, especially their image generation model that I think is making it like I'm using a lot for image generation. So anyways, there's this constant battle and dance going on. And so I think this is why they're only locking in a one year deal. So what are the terms of the deal?

Pavel said, this also strengthens Telegram's financial position. We will receive $300 million in cash and equity from XAI. Cash and equity, I'd be curious to see what the split is on that exactly. But regardless, XAI is, you know, it just acquired Twitter and it's getting huge. It's got billions and billions of dollars of investment. So equity in that company is probably going to be pretty valuable as well. But in any case, $300 million. And

And they also get 50% of the revenue from any X AI subscription that is sold through Telegram. So right now, Telegram allows their premium users, Telegram premium users, get access to Grok. But it would appear that now all users are getting access to Grok, even the free users, which is, you know, like they mentioned, over a billion users. So over 1 billion people

are going to be able to use Grok. And there's a whole bunch of interesting use cases. So Pavel kind of posted a video where he goes over all of his use cases that he would imagine being used. The first one is he shows off the fact that

When you're using it, you can call Grok, kind of like you do on Twitter, but you could, you know, at Grok and ask a question. There's also like right in right next to the search bar, there's a little Grok logo where you can click it, pulls it up, ask Grok a question. So it's literally like a quick link to chat GPT right in there. Yeah.

This is very similar to what Meta is doing with Meta AI. They've put Meta AI into Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp. And so I think that playbook is pretty, you know, it rocketed Meta AI to, you know, 500 million monthly active users. They don't really break down what percentage of that is through their direct app, what percentage of that is on like these kind of social media sites. But regardless, I've talked to a whole bunch of people that are like, oh yeah, I just asked Meta that. And I was like, that's crazy. Like that's just never been my workflow, but a lot of people do use that if you use these apps a lot. Yeah.

It's going to be something. So I think this is very interesting and this is what he's trying to tap. This is what they're trying to tap into. So it's accessible through search. It's inside of, you know, you have like your own kind of custom thread chat with it that you can use. You can also use it for fact checking apparently.

So you can also get it to summarize chats that you have going on. You can use it to, they call it a document digest, where you can get it to summarize like a PDF. A lot of the things that are capable of doing it, it's just useful inside of an interface with social media in it. So they also have something called link interface.

And they have group chat mode where essentially you can add it to your group chat and ask it questions. But also you can have it moderating your group chat. So in their specific example, they're

They have a chat called Crypto Bros. And when it's doing the group moderation, it's actually able to, you know, if people are just spamming it with links or other things, it's able to just automatically delete them according to whatever your settings are. So this is kind of cool.

And to be honest, this is something that I think they should probably set loose on Twitter itself and Meta and every social media platform if they could use AI to run around and clean up all the spam bot replies. That being said, I mean, maybe they catch some real people in there, so I'm sure people wouldn't be upset. But anyways, I do think this is interesting. They have it as an inbox agent, so you can kind of set it up.

uh, to like auto respond to people that message you with like basic information. They're examples of someone said, you know, what are your business hours and they're messaging it to a person or a business, then, uh, Grok can automatically respond to those questions. So that is quite useful. Um, with their fact check, uh, I thought this was kind of cool, but they do just have a button where you can fact check things. And, um,

It essentially gives you a summary of if it's true, and it bases it off of X has a really great data set where it has all these journalists and news and people doing on-the-ground news coverage, and all of that is getting sucked into the model in real time. So if you want to fact-check something like, hey, did this event just happen, it's going to go check Twitter, X, and Twitter.

be able to actually find you what's going on based off of people's accounts. They have some like funny things like that, you know, you see from Apple and meta, which is like generate stickers. They're like a 3d animation of a humanoid duck performing a cheerful dance and like, whatever it can do that. I'm not sure how useful it is other than it kind of being funny.

They also went so far as to do a bunch of kind of viral trends. So if you want to do like avatars, like make me look like a traveler, make me look futuristic, make me look whatever, right? Like Meta already does that in their Meta app, but you pretty much upload a photo of yourself and then you can generate yourself in a whole bunch of different ways. Those kind of go viral. And so you can...

You can make those avatars as well. All of that and probably some more features are coming this summer. So it's going to be interesting. $300 million deal. And there is a ton of features. And I think this is going to be a win-win for both companies. Grok obviously wants to get more users. I haven't really seen an announcement from Grok on how many monthly active users they have. I would assume they're going to try to pull off a deal like this where there's a billion people on Telegram, hope to get a big influx from that.

Plus however many people they have from X and plus however many people are just using the Grok app. And then they'll probably start making some announcements, trying to catch up to Facebook, which has 500 million, although slightly dubious. Google that has 600 million on the Google Gemini app, which is legitimately impressive. Yeah.

Or sorry, I think 400 million. And OpenAI, which has 600 million. So these are big numbers. All of these people are really fighting to be the number one AI model. There's a lot of distribution at play with Google and other people like that. And I think that XAI is trying to tap into that. You know, they could do these kind of all-cash...

cash and stock deals to push forward their usage. And I think their goal is that some percentage of these people are going to stick or buy direct subscriptions or just use Grok as a default instead of Chatshapti or something else because they become familiar with it, some of its feature sets and the way it essentially responds.

I'm fascinated by this. When this rolls out, I'll keep you guys updated. And also when Grok announces their uses of metrics, which I think are going to be boosted quite a bit by this, I'll also update you on that as I think that's going to be pretty fascinating to see what they can pull off with a combination of

Twitter, Telegram, and their standalone app. They might be able to finally kind of compete numbers wise with some of the other big players. So that'll be interesting. Thanks so much for tuning into the podcast. If you learned anything today, please leave me a review. Honestly, I know it's like everyone probably says that and I hear it all the time on podcasts. Um,

But it really does help me get great guests on, have great conversations, bring you these episodes. So I really appreciate it. And also make sure to check out AIbox.ai if you want to save on dozens of different AI subscriptions. Get them all for $20 a month and tons of cool features on there as well. You can go check that out. Link's in the description. Thanks so much for tuning in and I will catch you next time.