MAROKO133 Update ai: Rare 210-million-year-old crocodile cousins found during the rise of

📌 MAROKO133 Breaking ai: Rare 210-million-year-old crocodile cousins found during

Two hundred ten million years ago, two crocodile cousins tragically died side by side, according to Yale paleontologists who discovered this significant moment in time when crocodiles were diversifying before the rise of the dinosaurs.

First author Margulis-Ohnuma described the discovery as a “time slice.” The two new fossils uncovered in New Mexico provided Yale researchers with a rare snapshot of the diversification of proto-crocodiles at the dawn of the “Age of Reptiles.”

The fossils represent two proto-croc cousins who had to compete and interact with each other. They were “quite possibly looking at each other when they died,” likely due to a flash flood.

Although an unforeseen event may have taken their lives, their bones were preserved for over 200 million years. Eventually, they found a home within large blocks of rock at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale, where the authors of a new study discovered them.

The lack of physical evidence presents significant challenges for the field of paleontology in understanding species diversification at specific times and places on Earth. This latest discovery is uniquely thrilling, as the flash flood captured these unsuspecting cousins in a moment of daily life.

Same same but different

During the Triassic period, two reptile dynasties competed for dominance. One lineage would give rise to crocodiles and alligators, while the other would produce dinosaurs and the birds that would eventually conquer the skies. At this time, researchers explained, dinosaurs were slender-legged animals akin to herons, while four-legged crocodiles were the canines of the era.

A press release from Yale described the ecosystem before the Age of Reptiles as “sufficiently rich.” Close relatives developed specialized feeding anatomy to share resources. One can imagine that as species were diversifying during this time, they suddenly found they were different from their own kind, yet still related. To maintain harmony, they learned how to adapt and live with one another, even if they did compete (or bicker).

To investigate their anatomy, Miranda Margulis-Ohnuma, a Ph.D. student in Earth and planetary sciences in Yale’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS), conducted computed tomography (CT) scans of the crocodile, digitally disassembling the fossil bone by bone and revealing several variations of the Hesperosuchus species.

Cousins on the brink of the age of the dinosaurs

About the size of jackals, these cousins once roamed a riverbank in New Mexico. The long-snouted Hesperosuchus agilis hunted for food near rivers and streams using large back legs and smaller, thinner arms. On this fateful day, he was not alone; he was accompanied by his shorter-snouted cousin, identified as a new species named Eosphorosuchus lacrimosa. His robust jaw muscles gave him an advantage at snapping at large prey.

“Eosphorosuchus is one of only a handful of well-preserved early crocodile relatives, and its coexistence with Hesperosuchus represents the ‘dawn’ of functional diversification in the lineage that would give rise to modern crocodiles,” said first author Margulis-Ohnuma in a press release by Yale.

“In addition to its unique anatomy and preservational history, the specimen demonstrates the potential of existing museum collections to continue revealing novel insights into the history of life.”

🔗 Sumber: interestingengineering.com

📌 MAROKO133 Update ai: Salesforce rolls out new Slackbot AI agent as it battles Mi

Salesforce on Tuesday launched an entirely rebuilt version of Slackbot, the company's workplace assistant, transforming it from a simple notification tool into what executives describe as a fully powered AI agent capable of searching enterprise data, drafting documents, and taking action on behalf of employees.

The new Slackbot, now generally available to Business+ and Enterprise+ customers, is Salesforce's most aggressive move yet to position Slack at the center of the emerging "agentic AI" movement — where software agents work alongside humans to complete complex tasks. The launch comes as Salesforce attempts to convince investors that artificial intelligence will bolster its products rather than render them obsolete.

"Slackbot isn't just another copilot or AI assistant," said Parker Harris, Salesforce co-founder and Slack's chief technology officer, in an exclusive interview with Salesforce. "It's the front door to the agentic enterprise, powered by Salesforce."

From tricycle to Porsche: Salesforce rebuilt Slackbot from the ground up

Harris was blunt about what distinguishes the new Slackbot from its predecessor: "The old Slackbot was, you know, a little tricycle, and the new Slackbot is like, you know, a Porsche."

The original Slackbot, which has existed since Slack's early days, performed basic algorithmic tasks — reminding users to add colleagues to documents, suggesting channel archives, and delivering simple notifications. The new version runs on an entirely different architecture built around a large language model and sophisticated search capabilities that can access Salesforce records, Google Drive files, calendar data, and years of Slack conversations.

"It's two different things," Harris explained. "The old Slackbot was algorithmic and fairly simple. The new Slackbot is brand new — it's based around an LLM and a very robust search engine, and connections to third-party search engines, third-party enterprise data."

Salesforce chose to retain the Slackbot brand despite the fundamental technical overhaul. "People know what Slackbot is, and so we wanted to carry that forward," Harris said.

Why Anthropic's Claude powers the new Slackbot — and which AI models could come next

The new Slackbot runs on Claude, Anthropic's large language model, a choice driven partly by compliance requirements. Slack's commercial service operates under FedRAMP Moderate certification to serve U.S. federal government customers, and Harris said Anthropic was "the only provider that could give us a compliant LLM" when Slack began building the new system.

But that exclusivity won't last. "We are, this year, going to support additional providers," Harris said. "We have a great relationship with Google. Gemini is incredible — performance is great, cost is great. So we're going to use Gemini for some things." He added that OpenAI remains a possibility as well.

Harris echoed Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff's view that large language models are becoming commoditized: "You've heard Marc talk about LLMs are commodities, that they're democratized. I call them CPUs."

On the sensitive question of training data, Harris was unequivocal: Salesforce does not train any models on customer data. "Models don't have any sort of security," he explained. "If we trained it on some confidential conversation that you and I have, I don't want Carolyn to know — if I train it into the LLM, there is no way for me to say you get to see the answer, but Carolyn doesn't."

Inside Salesforce's internal experiment: 80,000 employees tested Slackbot with striking results

Salesforce has been testing the new Slackbot internally for months, rolling it out to all 80,000 employees. According to Ryan Gavin, Slack's chief marketing officer, the results have been striking: "It's the fastest adopted product in Salesforce history."

Internal data shows that two-thirds of Salesforce employees have tried the new Slackbot, with 80% of those users continuing to use it regularly. Internal satisfaction rates reached 96% — the highest for any AI feature Slack has shipped. Employees report saving between two and 20 hours per week.

The adoption happened largely organically. "I think it was about five days, and a Canvas was developed by our employees called 'The Most Stealable Slackbot Prompts,'" Gavin said. "People just started adding to it organically. I think it's up to 250-plus prompts that are in this Canvas right now."

Kate Crotty, a principal UX researcher at Salesforce, found that 73% of internal adoption was driven by social sharing rather than top-down mandates. "Everybody is there to help each other learn and communicate hacks," she said.

How Slackbot transforms scattered enterprise data into executive-ready insights

During a product demonstration, Amy Bauer, Slack's product experience designer, showed how Slackbot can synthesize information across multiple sources. In one example, she asked Slackbot to analyze customer feedback from a pilot program, upload an image of a usage dashboard, and have Slackbot correlate the qualitative and quantitative data.

"This is where Slackbot really earns its keep for me," Bauer explained. "What it's doing is not just simply reading the image — it's actually looking at the image and comparing it to the insight it just generated for me."

Slackbot can then query Salesforce to find enterprise accounts with open deals that might be good candidates for early access, creating what Bauer called "a really great justification and plan to move forward." Finally, it can synthesize all that information into a Canvas — Slack's collaborative document format — and find calendar availability among stakeholders to schedule a review meeting.

"Up until this point, we have been working in a one-to-one capacity with Slackbot," Bauer said. "But one of the benefits that I can do now is take this insight and have it generate this into a Canvas, a shared workspace where I can iterate on it, refine it with Slackbot, or share it out with my team."

Rob Seaman, Slack's chief product officer, said the Canvas creation demonstrates where the product is heading: "This is making a tool call internally to Slack Canvas to actually write, effectively, a shared document. But it signals where we're going with Slackbot — we're eventually going to be adding in additional third-party tool calls."

MrBeast's company became a Slackbot guinea pig—and employees say they're saving 90 minutes a day

Among Salesforce's pilot customers is Beast Industries, the parent company of YouTube star MrBeast. Luis Madrigal, the company's chief information officer, joined the launch announcement to describe his experience.

"As somebody who has rolled out enterprise technologies for over two decades now, this was practically one of the easiest," Madrigal …

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🔗 Sumber: venturebeat.com