Fresh off AI layoffs, Block now wants to whack Slack with agent-human collab tool

Summary

AI and ML Fresh off AI layoffs, Block now wants to whack Slack with agent-human collab tool Because what could be more appealing to humans than sharing virtual space with AI? After cutting over 4,000 jobs due to AI, fintech biz Block is back with Buzz, a shared workspace where humans and bots can collaborate in ways that are more auditable, sovereign, and secure than what you can do in chat tools such as Slack.Block's human-bot co-op is built upon a turducken of tech jargon: The platform is free and open source. It's based on the decentralized Nostr protocol, so there's cryptographic identity. It's "sovereign," a naively optimistic term readers of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash should recognize, which in this context means self-hostable. And it's intended as a replacement for Slack, GitHub, and various other communication and collaboration tools.If "Buzz" sounds familiar, that's because Google used that name in a social media faceplant more than 15 years ago. For those who missed the first go-around, Google Buzz, a failed social media service, gave rise to Google+, also a failed social media service. Block appears to believe that a decade and a half is sufficient for a brand cleanse. The project's GitHub repo offers a more apologetic assessment: "Yes, it's another AI-adjacent developer tool. We're sorry. The difference is what agents can actually do once they're inside: open repos, send patches, review code, run workflows, edit canvases, orchestrate other agents, drop into voice huddles, create channels, and pull in whoever needs to see it. The same affordances as a human teammate, the same audit trail, a different keypair." You can already sic software agents on collaborative workspaces. Block's main insight is that it would be useful to link AI agents with cryptographic identities. Others have already arrived at that conclusion. Hence OWASP's Agent Name Service, DNS for AI Discovery, Estonia's digital IDs for agents, and so on. But Buzz's badging of humans and bots ...