Mystery surrounds a deal to make the Grok chatbot available to Telegram users.

Grok chatbot logo

 

Mystery surrounds a deal to make the Grok chatbot available to Telegram users.

It remains unclear whether Elon Musk's artificial intelligence startup, xAI, and the messaging app Telegram have reached a preliminary agreement to make the company's chatbot, Grok, available on the messaging app for $300 million, or whether there is no agreement at all.

Pavel Durov, Telegram's founder, announced the agreement in a post on Twitter, stating that it will be for one year and that xAI will also give Telegram half of the revenue generated from any subscriptions made through the messaging app. He added that the $300 million will be paid in cash and stock.

Durov added that xAI would only access data that Telegram users explicitly share with Grok through direct interactions, according to Reuters.

However, Musk responded to Durov's post on X that no agreement had been signed. Durov clarified that the two parties had reached an agreement in principle, but that a formal agreement was still pending.

It is unclear from the context of this conversation whether there is indeed an agreement in principle, or whether Musk is denying any agreement at all, not just a signed one.

The deal could provide xAI, which acquired X earlier this year, with valuable data for training and developing its AI models.

With many open-source data repositories depleted, AI developers face increasing challenges in obtaining high-quality data, prompting companies like Meta to leverage user interactions with AI that occur in the public domain to train their models.

According to its privacy policy, X uses public user posts to train its AI models. It was not immediately clear whether XAI would use Telegram data similarly.

Elon Musk's AI startup xAI will pay $300 million to Telegram to deploy its chatbot, Grok, on the messaging app, aiming to tap into Telegram's user base of over one billion.