If you’ve been trying to decide whether or not to purchase solar panels for your home, Tesla has a new way to entice you: Renting them.
With solar rentals, Tesla says “customers get the best from solar power — clean, cheap energy to power homes and vehicles — without upfront costs or decades-long agreements. In fact, customers can get solar power with one click, instead of lengthy consultations and piles of paperwork.”
The company is offering the option to rent solar panels in six states: Arizona, California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New Mexico.
In order to participate, you need to be the homeowner and be a ratepayer with one of the specific utility companies Telsa is working with in your state. Rentals include the panels, as well as any other necessary hardware, installation, support, and maintenance costs.
The company is offering the service in small, medium, and large sizes. A small system is 3.8 kilowatts, a medium system is 7.6 kW, and a large one is 11.4 kW. Monthly rental costs for a small system vary by state and range from $50 to $65 a month. Tesla also has some estimates on how much power those panels are expected to generate each year.
Like all good deals, there is a catch: If you decide you don’t want to rent solar from Tesla anymore, you’ll be forced to pay a $1,500 removal fee to the company to take down the equipment. That fee can’t be waived. However, if you decide to sell your home you can transfer the monthly subscription to your home’s new owners, so you don’t have to remove the panels from your roof prior to the sale.
Panels can be upgraded once you install them, but can not be downgraded unless you want to pay that $1,500 fee.
Last year, Tesla started working with Panasonic on a new catalog of solar panels that blend into a customer’s roof, with no visible hardware. The panels were first announced in 2017, but were installed on their first roof in early 2018.
Tesla’s solar panel rental program comes days after the company lowered the price of its solar panels, in some cases dropping the price per watt to as low was $1.75, 16% lower than the national average of $2.09.
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.