The solar roofing competition is heating up, and one company in particular is looking to challenge Tesla head-on. Californian upstart Forward Labs has its own solar roof design, and not only is it cheaper than Tesla’s — it allegedly installs in half the time, too.
Technologically speaking, Forward Labs’s solar roof is slightly different than Tesla’s. The startup’s innovative design uses monocrystalline solar cells, which have a higher energy density than most other solar products. As such, these solar cells can achieve 19-watts per square foot compared to 11W per square foot for other solar cells.
Aesthetically, the overall design of the Forward Labs roof is notably different from Tesla’s as well. The Tesla roof is designed to mimic the classic rooftop shingle model, with each solar shingle made from three basic layers: a solar cell, a masking film, and a top layer of tempered glass. Conversely, Forward Labs’s design uses a single, fully-integrated standing-seam metal design with a similar tempered glass top layer.
While Tesla uses a a film to disguise the cells from onlookers (and pesky neighborhood associations), Forward Labs’ five-layer build comes with an “optimal chromatic cloaking” layer below the tempered glass. The roof is available in eight colors at the moment, however the chromatic layer means virtually any color is possible.
Forward Labs CEO, Zach Taylor, recently stated that his company’s solar roof will cost $8.50 per square foot for the roof (plus $3.25 per watt for the solar). And while many solar roofs can take nearly a week to install, the Forward Labs roof can be up and running in just a few days — or so the company claims. Most importantly, the final product will supposedly cost on average about one third less than Tesla’s solar roof.
Time will tell if these bold claims turn out to be true, but in the meantime, Forward Labs is currently taking preorders, and plans to launch the roof officially sometime in 2018.
This article was originally published with a photo of a house that did not have a solar roof. There are no photographs of Forward Labs’ solar roof at this time.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.
Military working dogs charge into places the rest of us would flee. So, I understand why anyone would want to breed tougher, healthier dogs for the job.
Warhound, a new startup from Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, has stepped out of stealth with $200 million to clone and gene-edit working dogs for American troops, police departments, and emergency services (via TechCrunch).
AI can describe a picture, identify objects, and answer questions about what a camera sees. But when a blind user needs a quick answer, getting an entire spoken essay about the scene isn't exactly helpful. Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have found that AI-powered visual assistance can leave blind users doing too much work to get the information they actually need.
The study, titled Say It My Way: Exploring Control in Conversational Visual Question Answering with Blind Users, examined how people interact with Be My AI, an AI-powered feature of the Be My Eyes app. The researchers found that users often received lengthy descriptions that didn't adequately address their immediate goals, forcing them to ask follow-up questions or find ways to steer the AI towards a more useful answer.