Feels oh so telling that xAI has to pay Telegram and not the other way around. If these offerings were so great wouldn't we all be clamoring for it?
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).
You CAN disable them. Append -ai to your Google search query. You're welcome.
Edit: curious why are people downvoting a helpful workaround?
(unfortunately not on this PC else I'd paste it)
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.
I do take some grim satisfaction from having Google pay for inference and then ignoring it though.
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.
I suspect some MAGA use it.
"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
The end result being all of us suffers in some way for the greed of a handful.
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.
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
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.
30 or so? So Reagan and Bush I somehow get a pass? It's literally still the same people and their stupid children.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
And Google basically invented LLM tech.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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…