Pavel Durov claims done deal to integrate xAI into Telegram

Claims xAI will pay Telegram $300m to take Grok as its on-board AI

Telegram CEO claimed that xAI will pay to integrate its Grok chatbot into the messaging platform. Musk denied a deal had been signed.

Elon Musk has denied striking a deal with messaging platform Telegram to integrate the AI tools of X, formerly Twitter, with Telegram’s platform.

Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov revealed details of a deal he said had been agreed via his account on X: “This summer, Telegram users will gain access to the best AI technology on the market. Elon Musk and I have agreed to a one-year partnership to bring xAI’s Grok to our billion+ users and integrate it across all Telegram apps.”

Durov also claimed that Telegram will receive $300 million in cash and equity in xAI, the holding company that encompasses both X and the company’s AI efforts, as well as a 50 per cent commission on subscriptions to xAI sold via Telegram. He indicated that the deal will initially last for just one year.

“This also strengthens Telegram’s financial position: we will receive $300M in cash and equity from xAI, plus 50 per cent of the revenue from xAI subscriptions sold via Telegram. Together, we win,” wrote Durov.

However, Musk replied to Durov’s post shortly afterwards stating, “No deal has been signed.”

Now on version 3, Grok is comparable to Chat GPT 4 and Claude 3.5. “Grok 3 is an advanced AI model... that does really well in science, maths, thinking, and written language. It surpasses notable competitors such as GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet,” according to senior applied scientist Rishav Hada, reviewing the latest AI releases for FutureAGI in April this year.

He continues: “It can handle a huge context window with one million tokens, which means it can process a lot of text at once… Grok 3's technological underpinnings are derived from its training on the Colossus supercluster, a vast infrastructure of 100,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs generating over 200 million GPU hours of processing capability – ten times more than Grok 2.”

Grok appeared to misfire earlier this month when it started replying to user requests with unrelated comments about the topic of “white genocide” in South Africa.

Telegram CEO Durov previously co-founded Russian social media network Vkontakt. He is estimated to have a net worth of $17.1 billion, according to Forbes’ latest billionaires list, making him the 118^th richest person in the world – compared to Musk’s first place with an estimated net worth of $342 billion.

He was arrested by officers from France’s anti-fraud office in August 2024 on arrival by private jet from Azerbaijan, accused on 12 counts of allowing the Telegram platform to be used to facilitate criminality. Durov was indicted on six chargesand although he was released from custody, he remains forbidden to leave without authorisation. A recent request to visit the US was denied by French authorities.

One month after his arrest, Telegram reversed its staunch policy on sharing user data with authorities, declaring that it would provide users' IP addresses and phone numbers to authorities in response to valid legal requests in a bid to reduce criminal activity on the platform.