Telegram and xAI agreed a one-year deal to integrate Grok into the chat app; Telegram will get $300M in cash and equity from xAI and 50% of subscription revenue.

great advertisement for signal

Nail no.1 in the coffin for me was when this Durov guy sent an unsolicited telegram-wide message on election day in my country, claiming French interference in our elections.
This is nail no.2 in the coffin.
Guess I’ll get off my lazy arse and delete my telegram account now

now telegram is going to insert random information about South African White genocide to every conversation. or it will be in every recommended reply at least.

I only use telegram to buy illegal iptv subscriptions. Is there a reason I would ever need grok in there?
- Yes, because we're only a few weeks away from Artificial General Intelligence, which will create an Artificial Superintelligence, and it'll be just like in the hit cyberpunk novel, Don't Create the Torment Nexus.

- Or Telegram.

There goes my telegram account. Bye, you won’t be missed
- I don't know why people stuck with it. I've used it; I get that a lot of the initial success/hype was:
  It's not owned by Meta
  "Putin hates Durov!"
  "Unlimited" storage (lots of people using it as free cloud storage, which is dumb if you value your files)
  But your messages are not E2EE by default (only "Secret Chats", which aren't synced across devices)...Telegram (the organization) could always read your messages. I said this so many times and got called everything under the sun.
  "Why would they care about my messages though?" ------> Because $300 Million.
  
  This. The second Premium landed I was out, and it was slipping long before that.
- Whelp. Same thought :(

Telegram ASTOUNDS me.
Like, there's been several instances of them outwardly admitting that their security sucks, not to use it for encrypted chats, that they just give logs away to world governments, and yet thousands of crypto bros and bots use telegram to function, EVEN ZLIBRARY, who could just as easily set up and use Matrix, has a Telegram bot for downloading books.
- Their bot api is very easy to use. I have made some telegram bots because is so easy. Tried to do the same with WhatsApp and didn't even get permission and api access.
  Average Joes use mainstream things, if you want to do something accessible, these bots are the way. Ideally, you want them to download or use an app that does some hand holding. I'm all up to the fediverse but let's be honest, it has some non intuitive things for today's user, most were trained to understand and like centralized services. They vaguely understand and use emails today, and mostly for account creation of other platforms.
  Disclaimer: haven't tried to make signal bots, they are a thing?
  
  No disrespect towards you or your response (which is a good response, btw) -- but the Bot API being good means absolutely nothing when the core app is garbage. By "garbage", I mean that it ignores basic best-practices (like not E2EE everything, which they claimed wasn't possible with device sync -- but look at FB Messenger, Signal, Whatsapp, etc all able to do it).
  Nobody is allowed to ask me why that matters. Because the answer is $300 Million.

Wondering how long has this been cooking? A year or so ago musk started attacking signal for no discernible reason and recommending telegram instead.

First thing i'm doing is opening a channel to run up Grok API calls maliciously

ew wtf, Telegram has been one of the less shittified ones :c
- Honestly, Telegramm always seemed to me a bit shifty since I learnt E2EE for chats was opt-in.
  
  Been saying this for years. Then they introduced Premium to "help fund things" (but they're also taking $300 MILLION from Elon, and giving them access to user data.
  So will basic features stop being paywalled now? Or are people going to have to keep paying to stop random people from messaging them?
  
  not even available on desktop clients, or for group chats

So, a software that is owned by US politician is working together with software that has links to Russian government?
- You misunderstand. Elon is retired from US politics now, obviously, and will return to being a force of good!
  
  Hasn’t Elon said that he’s “retiring” like every month 47 has been in office?
  Just bullshit to try to appease Tesla investors.
- Federal government threatened Telegram and demanded a backdoor a while back, iirc.
- Are we calling him a politician now? 😭

Big yikes

So you’re telling me that Grok is so bad that they have to pay developers to integrate it? How backwards. People are willing to pay for Grok’s competitors.
- Or is xAI paying for access to Telegram conversations to train Grok?
  
  This is the reason. Telegram has data and users that can be fed to the AI and they know it. Grok is hungry.
- This is the real take away from all this. xAI is trying hard to keep up with the big-boys and has to pay a shit ton of money just to be in the game. xAI's revenue will be in the deep red for a long time at this rate.
- to be fair, pretty much all ai is that bad these days :)

Telegram are being paid by xAI to use their product? Isn't it supposed to be the other way around?
- I'm guessing the money flows in this direction because telegram actually has users.
  
  The users must ask themselves if they're the product, fucking Musk is paying for access to them.
- Having xAI accessing a billion of users conversations? They are going to have the most "educated" LLM. Also isn't xAI getting subsidies from the government? Literalły workers of America are paying to spy, again
  
  The funny thing is, half of Telegram is drugs, conspiracy nuts and really weird humour. The ai is going to be great, I can already see it.
- AI companies paying or straight up buying other businesses to spread their disease has become their go-to strategy as of late.

You should be using Signal anyway.
- I think Telegram is more of a social media than a messenger.
  
  In my experience, telegram is one of those "if someone asks you to go on this app, they're trying to scam you" platforms. Flatly avoid.
  
  What, like Instagram kind of thing?
- I cant schedule an appointment at the vet with signal.
  
  Well if you tell them you are using Signal and they adopt it, you sure can.
  What is your imaginary boundary here where Telegram makes this easier somehow?
  
  there's this old thing called the telephone
  or if they're insufficiently modern (in a good way) a website

Gross. So glad I deleted it and moved to Signal
- Matrix (Element etc...)
  XMPP
  Session
  SimpleX
  Signal
  GNU-Jami
  Briar
  
  Briar would be great if I knew anyone who was willing to use briar
- Element here all the way!
- How is it for file sharing? It's my main use of telegram
- How is Signal financed?
  
  Donations and grants.
  
  Donations I believe.
- XMPP for me. Signal is nice, but you'll never know how nice and their software is very restrictive imo.

good news! signal has sticker packs
- If only any of my friends would have it.. I have a lot of contacts on telegram, and on signal there's like 1. Even my furry friends are not on there
  There are some active chats on matrix, but I don't know why on signal
  
  Maybe if you tell them that an LLM is being trained on all their "private" conversations now, they will change their mind?
- signal has sticker packs
  wait it does? maybe then I can convince my contacts to move there xD Seriously stickers are the main selling point of Telegram for us
- I tried to switch to Signal but it feels so damn barren compared to Telegram :(
  I want to love it but they make it hard
  
  Signal by design can't and won't support big group chats.
  Frankly Telegram is socially a reiteration of IRC plus blogs. There are groups where people chat, there are channels where posts have comments. Posts and their comments are visible in the associated group, so all the life of a community is in one place. That's important for small groups and mobile devices.
  Because these two things in the 00s web accounted for most of life.
  A TG alternative with ActivityPub identities and proper secret chats would be nice, of course.
  
  My biggest gripe with it is about electron. I refuse to keep it running on my PC. Even the damned Whatsapp converted to something better.

Ah, time to switch to a new messaging app :)
- Long overdue :)
- Agreed, but which one has easy to use bots and integration into the *arr apps? I used telegram to send notifications about new movies and episodes.
  
  Me too. Switched to pushover. Arrrrrr apps support it just fine. And it's free.
  
  I really need some free time in my life to try those arrs with unraid, and telegram bots too...

How many people pressed the play button in the image. I know I did.
- Im pretty brain rotted, but I guess I'm not quiiiite there yet...

There doesn’t seem to be any such thing as “good” AI, but there’s definitely a “worst” one, and Telegram chose it. Nice job, assholes.
- Well the other ones you have to pay for. This one pays you!

What is the fediverse chat equivalent?
- If you want something more like the fediverse itself, then Matrix. If you want something closer to Telegram out of the box without setup, then Signal or SimpleX.
  
  Signal doesn’t have bot support, so it’s hardly a Telegram equivalent sadly
  Matrix works though, but it has the fediverse problem of “which instance do I pick?”
- XMPP
- I use matrix synapse. You can self host or join an existing server.
  
  My Matrix server is conduwuit which was discontinued some time ago and your comment made me look at the GitHub page of its successor again, tuwunel...
  It's finally out! Ohh I'm so happy, updating today 😁

Can this be a joke pleaseeeee ?
- I've seen posts in TG that yes, this is a joke and there's been no such deal.
  
  Reuters reports it's true: Telegram, Musk-owned xAI partner to distribute Grok to messaging app's users | Reuters

I wonder if grok will read even secret chats on telegram
- Your secret chats are already being read. Hell, secret chats are probably the first to be read.
  A secret chat is only for local privacy, meaning if someone got access to your device they can't find them, nor will you get notifications (in case your partner is watching your screen).
  Back when we just had SMS and MMS, they had secret chats, too. They were blatantly marketed as tools to cheat on your partner. GO SMS was one of the first to use them. Its not so blatant anymore, but its still the primary use for "secret" chats.
  I remember reading an article that someone figured out everyone's GO SMS images (even secret ones) were uploaded online without any security whatsoever. You could put in the url and some random numbers and get any pictures and voice clips ever sent. And they never fixed it even after it was leaked.
  So yeah, not so secret. You want secure.
  Edit: Context: Sorry, my ADHD gets the better of me. I mean that there's more likely than not a government backdoor. Other users are unlikely reading your messages, but your messages are more than likely being scanned. Just be careful if you use TG.
  
  I thought secret chats were E2EE and weren't stored on servers. That doesn't necessarily mean Grok can't read them if it's not server side, but that's what I'm curious about.
  https://privacyinternational.org/guide-step/5540/telegram-secret-chats-end-end-encrypted

I’m so glad I don’t use telegram.

Fuck telegram. I get so many spam messages there.
- Only ever used it for one piece of software we use that decided their support network would be hosted on Telegram. All I get is spam message asking if I live in my own country...
- So.... why don't you delete your account there?
  
  Network effect. It's been hard enough to get friends and family to move away from Whatsapp, it's going to be a while till I get them away from telegram as well

Two insane billionaire eugenicists … working together? No way. Birds of like feather stick together.

If anybody still believed in Telegram's trustworthiness, it should now be dispelled.
(Only kidding, there's plenty of people who still "believe" in both Durov and Musk)
- I'll think about if they also somehow prohibit 3rd party clients from removing that AI garbage.
- Sad but true

If Grok starts responding with "idk I wanna kill myself" to "what do you want for dinner", I'm quite sorry, those are my conversations. To be clear, I'm not the one who constantly wants to die.
- Shoddy talk, grok's still alive.
  
  So is she, it was all manipulation.

"Eat moar AI! EAT IT!! EAT the AI you peasants!"

Im glad the EU started early with sanctioning Telegram, it will make things easier now. This is just a blatant attempt at enforcing Russian political influence.

who'd have thought that elon would get into bed with a ceo who was arrested for child porn
- Was he?
  
  I haven't heard that personally.

I thought The Establishment was all booboo Telegram badbad, I guess now they're just another toady

Fascist media meets fascist media... well....

I just use telegram for sailing the high seas so I couldn't care less. If I was actually communicating, I'd care.

SimpleX for the best anonymity. Signal for talking with grandma.