Las Vegas Exteriors And Landmarks - 2024

View from inside the Vegas Loop (Aaron P./GC Images)

Tunnel Vision

Tesla gets permit to test autonomous cars in Nevada as autonomous driving heats up there

Amazon’s self-driving Zoox launched service this week, and Google’s Waymo is testing there.

Tesla now has a permit to test its autonomous vehicles in Nevada, according a report yesterday from Tesla influencer Sawyer Merritt that was confirmed by TechCrunch.

Nevada, which has a lower barrier to entry for autonomous driving than states like California, is about to become a new hotbed for autonomous ride-hailing services.

Earlier this week, Amazon launched its self-driving Zoox service to the public for free at several locations along the Strip.

Google’s Waymo, which already has an operational autonomous vehicle service in five cities, announced at the beginning of the year that it would begin testing in Vegas in 2025.

Tesla currently operates a ride-hailing service with a regular human driver within four miles of tunnels below the city called the Vegas Loop, dug by the Elon Musk-founded Boring Company. When Sherwood News tried the service earlier this week, only two drivers were available to shepherd ride-seekers between several nearby resorts. After waiting about 15 minutes for our ride to arrive after being quoted three minutes, we wound up stopped at a red light underground behind the only other operational Tesla.

Took a Tesla ride through the Boring Company tunnels in Vegas. Only two cars were running. Got stuck in traffic behind the other car. pic.twitter.com/uSbqkPiYI0
— Rani Molla (@ranimolla) September 9, 2025

Tesla has been working on expanding the tunnels to more locations, including the airport, but had to suspend that activity yesterday after a worker “sustained a crushing injury.” A Vegas Loop employee told Sherwood it plans to open the route to the airport in January.

Tesla, which already sends cars autonomously through Boring Company tunnels at its factories, recently began testing supervised full-self driving within the Vegas tunnels, though the driver we rode with had doubts the cars could employ full self-driving tech properly in the tight tunnels underground.

Tesla currently operates only about 30 autonomous vehicles with a safety monitor in the passenger seat in Austin, Texas. It has autonomous testing permits now in Nevada and California (with a driver), and has applied for such permits in Arizona.

Tesla of course has big hopes and a rapid timeline for its autonomous deployment, which the company has said is central to its future.

“I think we’ll probably have autonomous ride-hailing in probably half, half of the population of the US by the end of the year,” Musk said during the company’s second-quarter earnings call in July. “That’s at least our goal, subject to regulatory approvals.”

Jon Keegan

19h

OpenAI and Microsoft reach agreement that moves OpenAI closer to for-profit status

In a joint statement, OpenAI and Microsoft announced a “non-binding memorandum of understanding” for their renegotiated $13 billion partnership, which was a source of recent tension between the two companies.

Settling the agreement is a requirement to clear the way for OpenAI to convert to a for-profit public benefit corporation, which it must do before a year-end deadline to secure a $20 billion investment from SoftBank.

OpenAI also announced that the controlling nonprofit arm would hold an equity stake in the PBC valued at $100 billion, which would make it “one of the most well-resourced philanthropic organizations in the world.”

The statement read:

“This recapitalization would also enable us to raise the capital required to accomplish our mission — and ensure that as OpenAI’s PBC grows, so will the nonprofit’s resources, allowing us to bring it to historic levels of community impact.”

A joint statement from OpenAI and Microsoft

The statement read:

“This recapitalization would also enable us to raise the capital required to accomplish our mission — and ensure that as OpenAI’s PBC grows, so will the nonprofit’s resources, allowing us to bring it to historic levels of community impact.”

Rani Molla

23h

BofA doesn’t expect Tesla’s ride-share service to have an impact on Uber or Lyft this year

Analysts at Bank of America Global Research compared Tesla’s new Bay Area ride-sharing service with its rivals and found that, for now, it’s not much competition for Uber and Lyft. “Tesla scale in SF is still small, and we don’t expect impact on Uber/Lyft financial performance in ’25,” they wrote.

Tesla is operating an unknown number of cars with drivers using supervised full self-driving in the Bay Area, and roughly 30 autonomous robotaxis in Austin. The company has allowed the public to download its Robotaxi app and join a waitlist, but it hasn’t said how many people have been let in off that waitlist.

While the analysts found that Tesla ride-shares are cheaper than traditional ride-share services like Uber and Lyft, the wait times are a lot longer (nine-minute wait times on average, when cars were available at all) and the process has more friction. They also said the “nature of [a] Tesla FSD ‘driver’ is slightly more aggressive than a Waymo,” the Google-owned company that’s currently operating 800 vehicles in the Bay Area.

Apple AI was MIA at iPhone event

A year and a half into a bungled rollout of AI into Apple’s products, Apple Intelligence was barely mentioned at the “Awe Dropping” event.

Jon Keegan9/10/25

Jon Keegan

9/10/25

Oracle’s massive sales backlog is thanks to a $300 billion deal with OpenAI, WSJ reports

OpenAI has signed a massive deal to purchase $300 billion worth of cloud computing capacity from Oracle, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.

The report notes that the five-year deal would be one of the largest cloud computing contracts ever signed, requiring 4.5 gigawatts of capacity.

The news is prompting shares to pare some of their massive gains, presumably because of concerns about counterparty and concentration risk.

Yesterday, Oracle shares skyrocketed as much as 30% in after-hours trading after the company forecast that it expects its cloud infrastructure business to see revenues climb to $144 billion by 2030.

Oracle shares were up as much as 43% on Wednesday.

It’s the second example in under a week of how much OpenAI’s cash burn and fundraising efforts are playing a starring role in the AI boom: the Financial Times reported that OpenAI is also the major new Broadcom customer that has placed $10 billion in orders.

Exclusive | Oracle, OpenAI Sign Massive $300 Billion Cloud Computing Deal

Yesterday, Oracle shares skyrocketed as much as 30% in after-hours trading after the company forecast that it expects its cloud infrastructure business to see revenues climb to $144 billion by 2030.

Oracle shares were up as much as 43% on Wednesday.

Large companies have started to drop AI from their businesses

Census data shows drop in large companies using AI

AI appears to be everywhere, but that doesn’t mean big companies have fully embraced the use of the technology in their day-to-day business.

Claire Yubin Oh, Jon Keegan9/10/25