June’s wildfire smoke, which had a devastating effect on air quality in Canada and the US Northeast, also blunted solar energy generation.

As plumes of smoke made their way south from Canada, they blocked out sunlight, leading to heavy clean-energy losses.

In parts of the eastern US, solar power generation dropped by as much as 50%, according to Bloomberg.

Besides blocking direct sunlight from hitting solar panels, wildfire smoke has the potential to disperse ash directly onto the panels, which can lower solar panel power production by as much as 40% if it is not removed.

Currently, solar power only accounts for 3.4% of the US energy mix, according to the Energy Information Administration, but as the country transitions to renewable energy and solar power becomes a more important part of that mix, the threat from the climate crisis increases as well.

Keep reading here.—JM

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After the European Parliament passed a draft of the AI Act, key additions caught the eye of Stanford researchers. Namely, this version of the proposed law, in addition to regulating use cases, also includes requirements for the creators of “foundation models,” or models trained on one large data set with many applications.

“It’s the only version so far that has specific separate requirements for foundation model providers,” Daniel Zhang, senior manager for policy initiatives at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, told Tech Brew.

Zhang is one of the co-authors of a report from the Institute’s Center for Research on Foundation Models, which conducted an evaluation of 10 major foundation model providers, grading them against 12 requirements from the European Parliament’s draft.

Based on Stanford’s five-point rubric, most flagship foundation models, including those created by OpenAI, Google, and Meta, don’t currently comply with EU regulations.

Keep reading here.—MA

Volunteer moderators of Q&A site Stack Overflow—one of the internet’s most active forums for programmers, data scientists, and IT professionals—have declared they are going on strike in response to mandates they say prohibit them from restricting AI-generated content.

In December 2022, Stack Overflow declared a temporary ban on ChatGPT-generated content. Yet it quickly backtracked, leaving the decision in the hands of the volunteers who run individual sites.

Moderators on the site and across the Stack Exchange network, which has hundreds of other Q&A communities, say the company has switched gears again and handed down guidance making it de facto impossible to stem the tide of AI-generated content.

In a May 30 post to the site, a Stack Overflow staff member wrote the company is asking moderators to apply “very strict standard of evidence to determining whether a post is AI-authored when deciding to suspend a user,” citing the inadequacy of moderators’ intuition and demonstrable inaccuracy in “current GPT detectors.”

In response, a group of moderators announced a strike, issuing an open letter saying that alongside the public statement, the company had also issued private guidance prohibiting mods from taking action on AI-generated content in the vast majority of cases.

Keep reading here.—TM

Stat: About 60%. That’s how much less data DuckDuckGo claims its Windows browser uses compared to Chrome. Ars Technica reported that it achieves this by “pre-blocking ad trackers.”

Quote: “It is not an exclusivity play at all...They’re thinking bigger than that, and they have the cash to make moves like this.”—Sony PlayStation chief Jim Ryan in an email about Microsoft’s planned acquisition of Activision Blizzard. The Verge, reporting on the Federal Trade Commission v. Microsoft hearings, described it as a “bombshell revelation”

Read: Heatwaves are stressing out power grids all over the world (The Verge)

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