Telegram’s user count has steadily climbed towards 1 billion

Sherwood News

Telegram: 1 arrested founder, 950 million users, and ~50 employees

8/28/24 5:52AM

Once a tech platform approaches a billion users, it stands to reason that most people have heard of it. Telegram might have been the exception… at least until its founder, Pavel Durov, was arrested in Paris as part of a wider investigation into an array of crimes taking place on the platform, from the spread of child sexual abuse material to drug trafficking.

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Some 950 million people reportedly use Telegram every month, a figure that’s steadily climbed every year since it was launched in 2013, and one that makes it more popular than Twitter/X, Snapchat, and Pinterest.

While millions use Telegram as a simple messaging service like WhatsApp or iMessage, many flock to the platform to take advantage of Durov’s laissez-faire approach to content moderation, which has seen it become “a theater of war, a clandestine marketplace, a safe haven for the deplatformed” and, according to the same Atlantic piece, “the world’s most important app”.

The way that Durov’s been running Telegram made the Russian-born billionaire’s arrest inevitable, writes Casey Newton in a new Sherwood piece, with the defense of its content moderation as “within industry standards” seeming “obviously false”. However, the longstanding accusations against Telegram and its position on criminal activity don’t seem to have hurt it on the road to 1 billion users.

Durovs’ arrest is perhaps even more important than it would be for any other founder-led company because of its remarkably small headcount: the business reportedly employs just ~50 full-time staff, meaning that the Telegrammer:worker ratio sits at around 19 million to 1.

Rani Molla

21m

BofA doesn't expect Tesla's ride-share service to have an impact on Uber or Lyft this year

Analysts at Bank of America Global Research compared Tesla’s new Bay Area ride-sharing service with its rivals and found that, for now, it's not much competition for Uber and Lyft. “Tesla scale in SF is still small, and we don't expect impact on Uber/Lyft financial performance in '25,” they wrote.

Tesla is operating an unknown number of cars with drivers using supervised full-self driving in the Bay Area, and roughly 30 autonomous robotaxis in Austin. The company has allowed the public to download its Robotaxi app and join a waitlist but it hasn’t said how many people have been let in off that waitlist.

While the analysts found that Tesla ride shares are cheaper than traditional ride-share services like Uber and Lyft, the wait times are a lot longer (9 minute wait times on average, when cars were available at all) and the process has more friction. They also said the “nature of [a] Tesla FSD ‘driver’ is slightly more aggressive than a Waymo,” the Google-owned company that’s currently operating 800 vehicles in the Bay Area.

Apple AI was MIA at iPhone event

A year and a half into a bungled rollout of AI into Apple’s products, Apple Intelligence was barely mentioned at the “Awe Dropping” event.

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Oracle’s massive sales backlog is thanks to a $300 billion deal with OpenAI, WSJ reports

OpenAI has signed a massive deal to purchase $300 billion worth of cloud computing capacity from Oracle, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.

The report notes that the five-year deal would be one of the largest cloud computing contracts ever signed, requiring 4.5 gigawatts of capacity.

The news is prompting shares to pare some of their massive gains, presumably because of concerns about counterparty and concentration risk.

Yesterday, Oracle shares skyrocketed as much as 30% in after-hours trading after the company forecast that it expects its cloud infrastructure business to see revenues climb to $144 billion by 2030.

Oracle shares were up as much as 43% on Wednesday.

It’s the second example in under a week of how much OpenAI’s cash burn and fundraising efforts are playing a starring role in the AI boom: the Financial Times reported that OpenAI is also the major new Broadcom customer that has placed $10 billion in orders.

Exclusive | Oracle, OpenAI Sign Massive $300 Billion Cloud Computing Deal

Yesterday, Oracle shares skyrocketed as much as 30% in after-hours trading after the company forecast that it expects its cloud infrastructure business to see revenues climb to $144 billion by 2030.

Oracle shares were up as much as 43% on Wednesday.

Large companies have started to drop AI from their businesses

Census data shows drop in large companies using AI

AI appears to be everywhere, but that doesn’t mean big companies have fully embraced the use of the technology in their day-to-day business.

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Report: Microsoft adds Anthropic alongside OpenAI in Office 365, citing better performance

In a move that could test its fraught $13 billion partnership, Microsoft is moving away from relying solely on OpenAI to power its AI features in Office 365 and will now also include Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4 model, according to a report from The Information.

The move is a tectonic shift that boosts Anthropic’s standing, heightens risks for OpenAI, and has huge ramifications for the balance of power in the fast-moving AI field.

Per the report, Microsoft executives found that Anthropic’s AI outperformed OpenAI’s on tasks involving spreadsheets and generating PowerPoint slide decks, both crucial parts of Microsoft’s Office 365 productivity suite.

Microsoft will have to pay the competition to provide the services —Amazon Web Services currently hosts Anthropic’s models while Microsoft’s Azure cloud service does not, The Information reported.

OpenAI is also reportedly working on its own productivity suite of apps.

Microsoft to Buy AI From Anthropic in Partial Shift From OpenAI