I’ve been using Slack for like a decade and the platform’s proprietary chatbot, Slackbot, has always been a bit underwhelming. It can deliver reminders and notifications and, well, that’s about it. That could change in the near future, as the platform is testing a redesigned Slackbot that’s chock full of AI.

The new Slackbot is basically an AI chatbot like all the rest, but this one has been purpose-built to help with common work tasks. Folks can use natural language to converse with the bot and it can do stuff like whip up project plans, flag daily priorities and analyze reports. It can also help people find information when they only remember a few scant details. The company says it will “give every employee AI superpowers” so they can “drive productivity at AI speed.” 

Slack/Salesforce

To that end, the new Slackbot integrates with tools like Google Drive, Salesforce and One Drive. It can provide “clear insights” by analyzing those other platforms. Slack also says that the chatbot will continue to grow and evolve, eventually being able to “take action on your behalf and build agents at your request, all with no code required.”

The Verge got a look at the new Slackbot in action and noted that it helped create a social media campaign using a brand’s tone and organized a product’s launch plan. The publication didn’t indicate if the social media campaign and product launch plan were any good.

The redesigned and AI-centric Slackbot is currently available as a beta to 70,000 users, but Slack has plans for a broad rollout by the end of the year. Companies will be able to turn off the feature, but all of us individual worker bees won’t have that luxury.

This is just the latest AI injection by Slack. After all, parent company Salesforce absolutely loves the technology. Slack recently added AI writing assistance to its Canvas document-sharing space and introduced AI‑generated channel recaps and thread summaries. It also recently came out that the company has been using people’s chats to train its AI models by default, with companies being forced to specifically request an opt-out.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/slack-is-transforming-its-slackbot-into-a-personalized-ai-companion-154156367.html?src=rss

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If you’ve been eyeing a big-screen upgrade but waiting for the prices to make sense, this might be the moment. The 77-inch LG C5 OLED Evo TV has dropped to $2,150, down from nearly $3,700, which is wild considering it’s only a few months into its release. Sitting just below LG’s flagship G5, the C5 borrows much of the same tech without the gallery-design markup. Reviewers, including CNET, praised it for its lifelike contrast, vibrant colors, and clean motion performance, but agreed it was a bit overpriced at launch. Now that the price has dropped, that part’s been taken care of.

LG 77-Inch Class OLED evo AI 4K C5 Series Smart TV w/Dolby Atmos, Dolby Vision, HDR10, AI Super Upscaling 4K, Filmmaker Mode, Wow Orchestra, Alexa Built-in (OLED77C5PUA, 2025)

$2,150.00
at Amazon

$3,696.99
Save $1,546.99

$2,150.00
at Amazon

$3,696.99
Save $1,546.99

Performance-wise, the C5 makes a convincing case for OLED fans who want more brightness without giving up those perfect blacks. Thanks to LG’s OLED Evo panel, it’s noticeably brighter than older C-series models (like the C3 or C4), hitting up to 870 nits in HDR scenes, but it’s not quite at the G5 or Samsung’s QLED level. Still, it’s plenty luminous for most living rooms. For gamers, the C5 is a dream setup with 4K at 120Hz, four HDMI 2.1 ports, VRR, G-Sync, and FreeSync support. You can plug in multiple consoles and still get buttery-smooth visuals with minimal input lag.

It also comes with webOS 24, LG’s latest smart TV platform, which now includes five years of guaranteed software updates, which is reassuring if you plan to hold onto this for the long haul. The Magic Remote (still a wand-style pointer) remains one of the more intuitive TV remotes out there, and it works with Alexa and Google Assistant for voice commands. You get Dolby Vision, HDR10, and the new Alpha 9 AI Processor Gen8, which uses machine learning to upscale older content and fine-tune color and tone scene by scene. There’s also a Filmmaker Mode that disables unnecessary processing to preserve the director’s intent, for a more natural movie experience. That said, while Dolby Atmos support helps, the onboard speakers of the C5 can’t quite match its visual impact. A soundbar or external setup is recommended.

Climate change has pushed warm-water coral reefs past a point of no return, marking the first time a major climate tipping point has been crossed, according to a report released on Sunday by an international team in advance of the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP30 in Brazil this November. From a report: Tipping points include global ice loss, Amazon rainforest loss, and the possible collapse of vital ocean currents. Once crossed, they will trigger self-perpetuating and irreversible changes that will lead to new and unpredictable climate conditions. But the new report also emphasizes progress on positive tipping points, such as the rapid rollout of green technologies.

“We can now say that we have passed the first major climate tipping point,” said Steve Smith, the Tipping Points Research Impact Fellow at the Global Systems Institute and Green Futures Solutions at the University of Exeter, during a media briefing on Tuesday. “But on the plus side,” he added, “we’ve also passed at least one major positive tipping point in the energy system,” referring to the maturation of solar and wind power technologies.

The world is entering a “new reality” as global temperatures will inevitably overshoot the goal of staying within 1.5C of pre-industrial averages set by the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, warns the Global Tipping Points Report 2025, the second iteration of a collaboration focused on key thresholds in Earth’s climate system.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Federal health agencies are reeling from mass layoffs on Friday that appear to have particularly devastated the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, despite some terminations being rescinded on Saturday.

Numbers are still sketchy, but reports from Friday indicate that more than 4,000 federal workers overall were initially targeted for layoffs. The Trump administration linked the firings to the ongoing government shutdown, which legal experts have suggested is illegal. Unions representing federal workers have already filed a lawsuit challenging the move.

Of the reported 4,000 terminations, about 1,100 to 1,200 were among employees in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). HHS is a massive department that houses critical federal agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, among others. Before Trump’s second term, the HHS workforce was about 82,000, but that was slashed to about 62,000 earlier this year amid initial cuts and efforts to push civil servants out.

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I came across possibly one of the weirdest official automotive accessories this morning, courtesy of a friend’s social media feed. It’s called the “Truckle,” and it’s a hand-crafted silver and bronze belt buckle that might be the envy of every other cowboy out there, since this one has a place to keep your F-150’s key fob without ruining the lines of your jeans.

The Truckle was designed by Utah-based A Cut Above Buckles, with a hand-engraved F-150 on the bump in the front. Behind the truck? Storage space for a Ford truck key fob, which should fit any F-150 from model year 2018 onward.

“You can put your key fob in the buckle—all your remote features work while it’s in the buckle,” designer Andy Andrews told the Detroit Free Press. “Once you have it in there, you’re not going to lose that key fob. You’re not going to be scratching your head (wondering) where it’s at. It’s right there with you in the Truckle.”

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Last week, sounding like a digital media consultant, Pope Leo XIV urged reporters to avoid “the degrading practice of so-called clickbait.” He was addressing global news agencies at a gathering in Vatican City about the risks of a post-truth world, with a speech that also doubled as a severe societal warning about the dangers of AI.

“Artificial intelligence is changing the way we receive information and communicate, but who directs it and for what purposes?” the pontiff said, according to Reuters. “We must be vigilant in order to ensure that technology does not replace human beings.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

REUTERS / Reuters

OpenAI is hungry for as much compute power as it can get its hands on, and the company has signed another deal with a chipmaker to help make that happen. This time around, it’s teaming up with Broadcom to make custom chips and systems for use in both OpenAI’s infrastructure and its partners’ data centers. 

OpenAI is designing the “AI accelerators” and systems. Broadcom will start deploying those racks in the second half of next year, the companies said. The aim is to complete the rollout by the end of 2029. The two companies are said to have started working together 18 months ago.

The deal is for 10 gigawatts of chips and it’s worth “multiple billions of dollars,” according to The Wall Street Journal. It was reported last month that OpenAI and Broadcom were making custom chips together. For what it’s worth, the latter’s CEO said recently that a new, unnamed client had put in an order worth $10 billion.

The Broadcom deal follows agreements that OpenAI recently struck with both NVIDIA and AMD. NVIDIA is investing $100 billion into OpenAI and will provide it with 10 gigawatts of AI infrastructure. The deal with AMD is for six gigawatts of compute power. OpenAI is said to be paying AMD tens of billions of dollars under that agreement and it could ultimately take up to a 10 percent stake in the company. As with the Broadcom rollout, both the NVIDIA and AMD deployments are expected to start in the second half of 2026. OpenAI also inked a deal with Oracle in July for 4.5 gigawatts in data center capacity as part of its Stargate Project.

According to recent reports, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told employees that he wanted the company to build out 250 gigawatts of compute power over the next eight years, significantly up from the 2GW it’s expected to have by the end of this year. (For context, 250GW is about a fifth of the energy generation capacity of the entire US, which sits at around 1,200GW.)

As things stand, it would likely cost around $10 trillion to buy that much capacity. Altman said OpenAI would have to develop new financing tools to make that happen, but he hasn’t elaborated much on what those might look like. Even its current deals have OpenAI on the hook for hundreds of billions of dollars.  

While the likes of NVIDIA and Microsoft have invested heavily into OpenAI, there isn’t a backer on the planet that can plow $10 trillion into the company. As things stand, OpenAI is very, very far away from making up the difference in revenue too. It’s reportedly expecting to make $13 billion in revenue this year.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/openai-is-making-its-own-ai-chips-with-broadcoms-help-142242231.html?src=rss

Owners of some Jeep Wrangler 4xe hybrids have been left stranded after installing an over-the-air software update this weekend. The automaker pushed out a telematics update for the Uconnect infotainment system that evidently wasn’t ready, resulting in cars losing power while driving and then becoming stranded.

Stranded Jeep owners have been detailing their experiences in forum and Reddit posts, as well as on YouTube. The buggy update doesn’t appear to brick the car immediately. Instead, the failure appears to occur while driving—a far more serious problem. For some, this happened close to home and at low speed, but others claim to have experienced a powertrain failure at highway speeds.

Jeep pulled the update after reports of problems, but the software had already downloaded to many owners’ cars by then. A member of Stellantis’ social engagement team told 4xe owners at a Jeep forum to ignore the update pop-up if they haven’t installed it yet.

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OpenAI and Broadcom are working together to develop and deploy 10 gigawatts of custom AI chips and computing systems over the next four years, a high-profile partnership aimed at satisfying some of the startup’s immense computing needs. From a report: OpenAI plans to design its own graphics processing units, or GPUs, which will allow it to integrate what it has learned from developing powerful artificial-intelligence models into the hardware that underpins future systems. As part of the agreement announced Monday, the chips will be co-developed by OpenAI and Broadcom and deployed by the chip company starting in the second half of next year. The new agreement will be worth multiple billions of dollars, people familiar with the matter said.

Broadcom specializes in designing custom AI chips that are specifically tailored to certain artificial-intelligence applications. It began working with OpenAI on creating a custom chip 18 months ago, and the companies broadened their partnership to include work on related components, including server racks and networking equipment.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Young people are always finding new ways to blur the lines between irony and sincerity, the public and the private, and every thing else: TikTokers are using a caveman schtick to tell sad romantic stories; a Twitch streamer broadcast the birth of her daughter to her adoring chat; and young people are meeting a deadly serious political moment with colorful animal costumes. There’s also a new cartoon, for some reason, from Nintendo, and the rise of slopcore.

The Portland Frog and Chicken

The young people in Portland are changing the idea of what “protesting” means. In the days since the President declared Portland a “war zone” and a “never-ending disaster,” more and more young people have been showing up to protests dressed in colorful costumes. Frog guy was first. You can see him here, bravely facing down a cadre of heavily armed men:

before being pepper-sprayed for his trouble.

And then there’s the chicken guy, whose presence in front of an ICE facility provided important context to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s recent rooftop photo opportunity. “Our reality is beyond satire at this point,” Chicken Guy (aka Jack Dickinson) told The Atlantic. “So meeting it with absurdity…I guess that’s the idea.”

Frog and Chicken seem to have inspired others to meet ICE and the National Guard with absurdity (and colorful costumes), which might be the sign of a growing movement.

Protestors have been using ridiculousness to make their point since protests began, but the instant, worldwide dissemination of videos from Portland’s “front line” is fairly new. Images of heavily armed and armored law enforcement officers staring down Portland weirdos in unicorn and panda costumes makes a more compelling point than would clashes with radicals in ski masks—you don’t have to think very hard to know which side you’re on. And there’s something so Portland about the whole thing.

Twitch streamer Fandy livestreams her child’s birth

Austin based Twitch streamer Fandy is known as much for letting her 300,000 followers in on her personal life as she is for playing Overwatch, but the 30-year-old influencer cranked it up to 11 last week when she livestreamed her daughter’s birth. Fandy started streaming as soon as she went into labor, with 30,000 or so concurrent visitors on Twitch alone watching her deliver another human into the world. She even joked around with her chat in between breathing and contractions, and Twitch CEO Dan Clancy stopped by to offer congratulations. After a routine eight-hour labor, Fandy showed her child off to the world.

Her fans seem mostly happy to be included but some are questioning whether a live birth is in keeping with the streaming platform’s terms and conditions, and more importantly, if it was fair to the child who didn’t ask to be born and definitely didn’t ask to be livestreamed.

On the other hand, Fandy’s stream takes parasocial relationships to a new level, her fans seemed happy to be included, and who wouldn’t want to have 30,000 godparents?

Why are so many TikTokers talking like cavewomen?

It’s becoming cool on TikTok for young women to talk like cavewomen. Over videos labeled “POV: We’re Cavewomen and I’m Telling You About My Ex,” folks are spilling their guts about past relationships, while replacing “I” with me and generally leaving out articles.

The trend seems to have started when @em.brdly posted this video about she (sic) disastrous introduction to polyamory:

Others followed, detailing they bad experiences with young men:

But talk like caveman old! She make video talk like cavewoman “Karen” 2024:

He talk caveman 1991:

Like me say, more things change, more stay same.

What is “slopcore”?

Slopcore is the slang term for the countless 100s of millions of cheesy-looking, unsettling, AI-generated images, videos, and songs that have hit the internet since AI was given to the masses a couple of years ago. It also describes the uncanny, dreamy, slightly menacing vibe of all that slop. I did a deeper dive here, if you want to get further into the slop with me.

Viral video of the week: Nintendo teases…something

On Oct. 7, Nintendo posted this video on X with the caption “Close to You”:

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

and no one knows why. There are no credits; there’s no logo. It’s just a baby chasing a pacifier. But because it’s Nintendo’s baby, the video has been streamed over 16 million times on X alone, and everyone seems to have a guess. Some theories:

• It’s a teaser for a new Pikmin game.

• It’s teasing a new Earthbound game.

• It’s teasing a new Chibi-Robo game.

• It’s teasing a new Elebits game (even though Elebits was from Konami)

• “Nintendo Baby” is being introduced as a character in Smash Brothers.

• Its the first look at a new Nintendo intellectual property involving babies and pacifiers.

• It’s a short meant to show off what Nintendo has been doing with its new animation studio.

• Nintendo wants to show its fanbase an experience that they will never have.

The point is there’s no way to know and it could be anything. (But it’s Pikmin, because Nintendo has released a Pikmin game for every console since the GameCube.)