📌 TOPINDIATOURS Hot ai: NASA Telescope Discovers Nearby Planet With Deep Similarit

Astronomers have discovered what appears to be an exoplanet that could be a distant Earthly paradise. Or it could be a frigid realm even chillier than Mars, incapable of supporting life.

The margins are very fine when studying planets outside our solar system. But this new candidate planet, dubbed HD 137010 b, is an especially promising detection that hints at a habitable world that in many ways appears to mirror our own. 

As detailed in a new study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters and highlighted by NASA, the rocky outpost orbits a Sun-like star and is nearly the same size as Earth. Its orbit is almost a carbon copy, too, equal to around 355 Earth days. Even better? It’s practically next door.

“What’s very exciting about this particular Earth-sized planet is that its star is only [about] 150 light-years away from our solar system,” coauthor Chelsea Huang, a researcher at the University of Southern Queensland in Australia, told The Guardian. “The next best planet around a sun-like star, in a habitable zone, [Kepler-186f] is about four times farther away and 20 times fainter.”

The researchers discovered the candidate world while examining data gathered by the NASA Kepler space telescope in 2017. It captured only a single transit of the exoplanet, in which it passes in front of its star and causes a detectable dip in light. This left behind enough clues to infer its size and speed.

The big and obvious difference between our star system and the candidate exoplanet’s is the star itself. Our Sun is considered a G-type yellow dwarf, steadily burning at a moderate temperature for billions of years. But HD 137010 is a K-type orange dwarf, which is slightly smaller and cooler. That means the candidate exoplanet potentially receives less than a third of the light and heat that the Earth does, with estimated temperatures lower than minus 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Mars, for comparison, is around minus 85 degrees Fahrenheit.

There’s significant debate among astronomers over whether smaller stars like orange and red dwarfs are ideal hosts for habitable worlds because of how closely a planet needs to orbit them to stay in their habitable zone. At such proximity, a planet could be “tidally locked” to the star, a state in which it’s unable to rotate, forcing the same side of the planet to face the star for eternity.

That said, there’s a good chance that HD 137010 b could be a temperate and even watery world if it has a much more carbon dioxide rich atmosphere than Earth, allowing it to trap what little heat it receives. Mars is thought to have once been warm and wet, too, before its atmosphere, which may have also been swimming with CO2, largely vanished billions of years ago.

Follow-up observations are needed before the matter is settled. Sara Webb, an astrophysicist at Swinburne University, called the discovery “exciting” but told The Guardian that three transits, not just one, are considered the “gold standard” for planetary science. Still, Huang says the detection was a “textbook example” of a planetary transit, thanks to the closeness and brightness of the star.

More on space: There’s Something Fascinating Hiding Under Jupiter’s Clouds, Scientists Find

The post NASA Telescope Discovers Nearby Planet With Deep Similarities to Earth appeared first on Futurism.

🔗 Sumber: futurism.com

📌 TOPINDIATOURS Update ai: Salesforce rolls out new Slackbot AI agent as it battle

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