It's the next logical step after companies shoving AI into every corner of their own products regardless of whether their users want it - now they're paying other companies to shove AI things into their products regardless of whether their users want it. Genuine user interest doesn't come close to justifying their insane valuations so they have to put their thumb on the scale by shoving it everyones face and then pretending that's the same thing.
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).
It's absolutely wild and scary watching how much money is being spent on pushing AI down the unwilling public's throats. Nobody wants this. Yet we're hiring expensive AI researchers and developers, buying datacenters full of GPUs, and now paying "partner" companies, to deliver this thing that nobody is asking for. What in the world is going on here? What am I not understanding?
> What in the world is going on here? What am I not understanding?
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's not to understand? 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.
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.
the other issue with that isn't just the decision making but the fact so much capital is accruing at the top they have nowhere else to put it all, meanwhile average people are struggling to pay rent and buy food...
Reaganism set the wheels in motion but those wheels didn't actually come off until events like the dotcom boom normalized billion dollar valuations for half baked MVPs, creating a generation of future nutters like Thiel, Bezos, Zuck and Musk. Things accelerated even further with zero interest rate policy post-2008, making capital free for this "job creator" class while working people were charged "market rates" for home and education loans.
But the land they're grabbing is desert with no water and no access roads. Does anyone besides the few with their wealth invested in AI believe that AI is the next iPhone moment?
> Does anyone besides the few with their wealth invested in AI believe that AI is the next iPhone moment?
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
I think it’s probably as simple as some old fool on Sand Hill Rd got suckered into writing a check for this nonsense with promises of world domination by AI’s promised infinite profit with minimal cost. And to keep the whole charade going, everyone has to pretend that this will eventually see some returns otherwise the whole farcical system will come crashing down. We can only hope that happens and some correction rears its head.
The end result being all of us suffers in some way for the greed of a handful.
The corporate world is overrun with executives designing products that look like solutions to other executives but that don't solve any problems problems people in the real world actually have.
It is funny seing xAI, the trash-tier AI company, integrate with Telegram, the trash-tier messaging service.
Enshitification is often a company-wide culture problem, but the fish does rot from the head.
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.
Example: Since this deal was cash + equity I wondered whether telegram has a public valuation. I searched google and got an AI summary saying that the market capitalization of TELEGRAM is $7.4767.
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.
xAI has essentially zero market outside of twitter, and with recent system prompt shenanigans from Elon, I cannot imagine anyone signing up to pay for API hits when there's a non-zero chance your application will suddenly start complaining about white genocide. They're painted themselves into a corner with the product and Elon's increasingly erratic behavior, they now have to pay companies to use their service.
Are they paying for API hits and developing application stacks around the service? It's clear who uses it, it's a lot less clear who might be willing to pay for it.
Because it isn't disabling them - that would be an option to actually disable them.
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.
or instead of searching for "best dog breeds for apartments" change it to "best f'in dog breeds for tiny s-hole apartments" - feels much more cathartic
We've seen multiple companies in the last twelve months blast past any past benchmark of fastest growing company ever. It's become pedestrian for some of these companies to scale to $10m ARR in a quarter which has never happened before.
"Genuine user interest doesn't come close to justifying their insane valuations" - classic HN copium
> 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.
Models are only as good as the data that is fed into them. OpenAI is paying Reddit 70M for access to the data. So the real value here is the conversations, not the model.
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 think this is more the case. xAI is looking for more data to ingest.
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?
I don't like Grok that much, but there's nothing particularly new or interesting about this deal. Telegram has a big international audience, it makes sense someone would pay to be the default for user adoption reasons.
"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 Google Search deal seems like a much more defensible business decision to me for a couple reasons. For starters Google gets revenue almost every single time that search integration is used so there is a direct return on the investment. What's the conversion rate for a paid Grok account? It might turn out to be terribly low and $300M is a substantial amount of money. I doubt a normal company without Elon's vast wealth network that needs to actually make money would gamble on a deal like this.
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.
No matter how good your offering is, you always need marketing if you are competing against an established behemoth in the space like OpenAI. Even Google has been unable to make much of a dent in OpenAI's daily active users despite having superior distribution and (recently) comparable quality.
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.
Telegram is ostensibly a competitor if you buy into Musk's pitch for X as an "everything app". Paying Telegram $300M instead of developing chat features and/or marketing proves that plans for the "everything app" are dead in the water, or perhaps were never sincere from the get go.
It's honestly a good fit. Telegram also doesn't have the best image, but people don't care, so it's highly likely that they also don't care about the image of XAI or Musk.
I do struggle with the 1 billion users, but I also don't believe that X has 600 million users actual users.
We'll have to see how privacy is handled (whether you can opt out of it suckling on every one of your personal conversations) but assuming some baseline decency from Telegram, I don't think anyone would be "forced" to use it.
> 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.
I know my experience is anecdotal, however, I know at least three people at my workplace who have said in our Slack channel they will never, ever but a Tesla because of Musk's antics while typing it using a Statlink connection.
It sounds like they'll buy an alternative product when one is available. Tesla, X, and xAI all have multiple viable alternatives - superior alternatives even. That's not yet the case for Starlink in many locations[0], but in 5-10 years, your colleague may be using an Amazon Kuiper, One World, Garmin[1], or Apple[1] connection.
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.
Grok3 could be leagues ahead of anything else in the game and yet a large portion of the western population would never use it due to its owners antics.
True, but Musk is an exception. And deliberately so, his media image was one of the things that made Tesla so notable. But we’re seeing recently that it goes both ways.
Musk was the PR, press and Marketing departments rolled into one for Tesla and X, so much so that he fired the PR team at Twitter.
"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.
Don't underestimate how far they've fallen. Tesla is nowhere near the top in Europe anymore. VW sold three times as many EVs as Tesla, with BYD in second place.
This is wrong and I would encourage you to check your sources or look into the industry more before posting a blind yahoo article that was clearly written by AI.
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.
Definitely makes sense that if they are a market leader for an extended period of time they would expect to trade sideways; my question is whether or not Tesla is expected to come out stronger as a growth company in the upcoming quarters (i.e. their recent talks of doing robotaxi work; are investors seeing that as a serious growth angle?) or should Tesla begin investigating an income/dividend stock angle?
Valid. And I do think they'll continue to own the lion's share of total sales for a while. But is there any concern over their being down YOY for Q1 while other manufacturers are largely growing? Or is the expectation that it's a temporary blip and they'll continue growing in the upcoming quarters from previous YOY numbers?
> And I do think they'll continue to own the lion's share of total sales for a while
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.
Don't bet against Google. Their cloud is growing despite coming from 4th or 5th place, now it's on 3rd place and growing faster than AWS and if I recall correctly, faster than even Azure.
> "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.
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:
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.
You need to make your way through 1-5 to get to 6, but I specifically excluded 5 (organization of militias).
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.
>You need to make your way through 1-5 to get to 6
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.
And I'm telling you that 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 are the ones that are active right now.
> "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.
>And I'm telling you that 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 are the ones that are active right now.
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.
> Thank you. This is all that needs to be said on this subject.
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.
>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.
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 is Google was paying a rev share, so both parties make bank off the deal, mostly Google. Here, there is no shared interest, just one company taking money from another for distribution with no financial return. Neither company has any incentive to make it work well.
Google didn't have to pay anyone back in 1999 or early 2000s.
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.
Google pays a rev share on the return it gets from the deal. This isn't pay and cross your fingers child's play here. Google makes most of the money for search transactions that click ads and the distributor, Apple, makes a small fraction of that for providing the search access points. Where's xAI's lucrative return here? Where's their 80:20 split?
Time for some no-evidence conspiracy theory: the API-based "AI"s are surveillance vectors, so this is just cover for running all your conversations through a tool to determine which ones to report to which authorities.
(while in theory they can be run locally, in practice this is rare)
Most users would probably use Google by default if forced to pick on install. Google is effectively paying so that their competitors like Microsoft won't sign their own deal and become the default Firefox search instead.
That's different as X is buying a form of exclusivity there.
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.
Yeah but chat results in paid subscriptions and it disincentives telegram from creating their own AI chat. Google also pays for most browsers and other ecosystems which aren't really considered "locked"
No different. It is an attempt to prime the pump to stoke valuations. The product is the stock price go up, the illusion of value creation is the work. "Please Use."
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 a fraction of the money Goggle makes from ad clicks driven by Firefox, a revenue sharing agreement. Where's xAI's 80:20 split here? Where's the default AI interface in Telegram that users would fill with some other AI service if Telegram wasn't getting paid for the distribution? Where's the user expectation of AI in the product in the first place.
This is nothing like the Google Mozilla (or Googlge Apple or Google whoever) deal.
"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?"
Please tell us what you believe this is telling us. You’ve left it up to interpretation and this feels more like a Reddit quality comment than one that the hackernews community deserves.
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
> “llm has no value so the providers are paying for people to use it”,
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.
They pretty much did say “not the other way around” with
“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…
That's an interesting way of looking at it thanks for sharing. In that way it's similar to Google paying to be the default search engine in Firefox or on iOS. They _did_ have the best search engine at the time but they still paid platforms to have it embedded as a default option.
