I am genuinely curious about the business strategy behind the move bc that would be a market worth exploring - having something that the AI industry would pay for bc they are willing to spend a lot right now.
Perfectly valid question.
IMO, because xAI is the junior partner in this relationship.
Telegram is bigger and more important than X.
Unlike the 45 billion self-purchase price xAI paid for X, the realistic value for X is, what, 9 billion? I've heard Telegram is estimated to be in the 30-40 billion range: https://web.archive.org/web/20210323132059/https://techcrunc...
Who will „win“ the LLM-AI race is as much undecided as is the common way to interact with them and this seems like quite a sensible bet on distribution for a huge userbase with a very specific integration into a platform. Doesn’t seem at all crazy to me.
- Data to train on
- Being the first GenAI experience of users that then might associate this stuff with xAi branding.Windows has had copilot baked in for a while now, where genai stuff is already possible.
Meta has their ai baked into WhatsApp, and probably into instagram as well (not sure though)
Google is rolling out gemini on android.
I would posit that for a majority of telegram users, xAi is just going to be "yet another AI integration" for them, and it'll be nothing novel.
I guess they are still rolling out the feature.
The value is in manipulation, not monies