A Musk-Telegram AI Pact Sets the Stage for More Drama
Conspiracy theories and extremism on Pavel Durov's freewheeling app could be supercharged by a deep integration with AI chatbot Grok.
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Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, she is author of 'Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World.'
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It's hard to find a pair of tech billionaires more alike than Elon Musk and Pavel Durov. Both are staunch libertarians who run large social media platforms with minimal content moderation, and both champion themselves as defenders of free speech. Both are also pro-natalists, with Durov claiming to have fathered more than 100 biological children through sperm donation.
It's an ideological match made in heaven — and perhaps in business too. Durov this week announced a one-year partnership with Musk's xAI, in which the latter artificial intelligence lab would pay Telegram $300 million in cash and equity to integrate its Grok chatbot into the messaging app. In essence, Telegram gets whizzy new AI features while Grok gets distribution on a platform with roughly 1 billion users, double the number of people on X. But there are a couple of snags.
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