Tesla makes cars, batteries, home energy storage systems, and solar roofs. So what’s next? Glass. In a call with investment analysts earlier this week, CEO Elon Musk said a Tesla glass technology group is making a new type of glass that will be used in the Tesla Model 3, as reported by Electrek.
During the call, Musk was explaining the advantages of Tesla’s solar roof when he talked about the glass layer in the roof tiles. “It is using a lot of techniques used in [the] automotive glass business,” he said. “In case it wasn’t obvious with the announcement, Tesla has created a glass technology group — with some really phenomenal people.”
Called “Tesla Glass” tile in a video that demonstrated the strength of the new glass compared to terra cotta, clay, and slate tiles. In a slow-motion video, four kettlebells are dropped from what appears to be about four feet above the tiles. The other tiles all shatter but the Tesla Glass Tile stays intact — you can see a white mark on the tile, but it does not break.
Musk said that the first automotive application of Tesla Glass will be the Model 3, scheduled to start production in mid-2017 with first deliveries in the fall. The Model 3 has a lot of glass — it’s not clear if all the glass in the car will be Tesla Glass, but apparently the component cost won’t be an issue, and not just because it will be produced in house.
When he was talking about the solar tiles, Musk said it’s fairly inexpensive to produce glass in volume and therefore extensive application makes sense.
As Electrek reported, one of the Tesla Glass Technology group’s “really phenomenal” people is director Mike Pillod. Formerly one of Apple’s top materials engineers, Pillod was involved in many Apple patents for glass touch screens and electronic devices that use glass, such as the iPhone.
In addition to Tesla Glass applications in future Tesla vehicles and solar tiles, it’s a sure bet Tesla has other potential uses in mind and possibly in their R&D labs.
San Francisco startup Dimensional advertised for people to walk robot dogs through city streets. The New York Times reported that the job could include carrying a roughly 33-pound robot back to the office if it overheated. A lift home is an awkward requirement for a labor-saving machine.
Keeping the hardware running is only one challenge. Anthropic's robotics tests found that language models mostly failed when controlling joints directly, but did better when directing trained controllers. Giving an AI agent a body doesn't teach it to handle ordinary household objects.
Soon, a mattress protector may be more than a bed cover. Australian medtech company Sleeptite and researchers at RMIT University have received a US patent for FlexiSense, a smart bedding technology that tracks body position and posture to help caregivers identify when older residents may be at risk of falling.
The technology is being developed for Sleeptite’s in-bed monitoring system, REMi, and was recently on display at The MedTech Conference in Boston. A peer-reviewed study in Flexible and Printed Electronics says the sensors can also be made at scale without sacrificing performance or durability.
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.