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.

9/12/25 8:49AM

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.”

The most outlandish tech CEO quotes from 2025

Tech CEOs have been nuttier than ever.

Rani Molla2h

Rani Molla4h

Trump AI executive order is a “major win” for Open AI, Google, Microsoft, and Meta, says Ives

President Trump’s new executive order aiming to keep states from enacting AI laws that inhibit US “global AI dominance” is a “major win” for OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Meta, according to Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives. Big Tech companies have collectively plowed hundreds of billions into the technology, while seeing massive stock price gains, and Ives believes they stand to gain much more.

“Given that there have been over 1,000 AI laws proposed at the state level, this was a necessary move by the Trump Administration to keep the US out in front for the AI Revolution over China,” Ives wrote, adding that state-by-state regulation “would have crushed US AI startup culture.” The presidential order would withhold federal funds from states that put in place onerous AI regulations.

This morning, Whitehouse AI adviser Sriram Krishnan said in a CNBC interview that he’d be working with Congress on a single national framework for AI.

Despite Ives’ rosy read-through on the order, with the exception of Nvidia, which jumped on a report of boosted Chinese demand, many AI stocks are in the red early today. The VanEck Semiconductor ETF is down nearly 1% premarket, as the AI trade struggles thanks to underwhelming earnings results from Oracle earlier this week.

Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence

This morning, Whitehouse AI adviser Sriram Krishnan said in a CNBC interview that he’d be working with Congress on a single national framework for AI.

Rani Molla22h

Epic scores two victories as “Fortnite” returns to Google Play and appeals court keeps injunction against Apple

“Fortnite” maker Epic Games notched two wins Thursday in its drawn-out battle against Big Tech’s app stores. “Fortnite” returned to the Google Play app store in the US, Reuters reports, as Epic continues working with Google to secure court approval for their settlement.

Meanwhile, a US appeals court partly reversed sanctions against Apple in Epic’s antitrust case, calling parts of the order overly broad, but upheld the contempt finding and left a sweeping injunction in place — keeping pressure on Apple to allow developers to steer users to outside payment options and reduce its tight control over how apps can communicate and monetize on iOS.

So many reasons to drop in this month... and now we're on Google Play in the U.S. too!

Android: https://t.co/Z6pkYqYsRI
iPhone: https://t.co/JNpTVneGMN
PC: https://t.co/CPsjp3XNdo pic.twitter.com/TV9b1ZlqfJ
— Fortnite (@Fortnite) December 11, 2025

Jon Keegan22h

Report: AI-powered toys tell kids where to find matches, parrot Chinese government propaganda

You may want to think twice before buying your kids a fancy AI-powered plush toy.

A new report from NBC News found that several AI-powered kids toys could easily be steered to dangerous as well as sexually explicit conversations in a shocking demonstration of the loose safety guardrails in this novel category of consumer electronics.

A report out by the Public Interest Research Group details what researchers found when they tested five AI-powered toys for kids bought from Amazon. Some of the toys offered instructions on where to find matches and how to start fires.

NBC News also bought some of these toys and found they parroted Chinese government propaganda and gave instructions for how to sharpen knives. Some of the toys also discussed inappropriate topics for kids, like sexual kinks.

The category of AI-powered kids toys is under scrutiny as major AI companies like OpenAI have announced partnerships with toy manufacturers like Mattel (which has yet to release an AI-powered toy).

AI toys for kids talk about sex and issue Chinese Communist Party talking points, tests show

The category of AI-powered kids toys is under scrutiny as major AI companies like OpenAI have announced partnerships with toy manufacturers like Mattel (which has yet to release an AI-powered toy).

Jon Keegan22h

OpenAI releases GPT-5.2, the “best model yet for real-world, professional use”

After feeling the heat from Google’s recent launch of its powerful Gemini 3 model, OpenAI’s response to its “code red” has been released, reportedly on an accelerated schedule to keep up with the competition.

The company’s new flagship model, GPT-5.2, is out, and the company is calling it “the most capable model series yet for professional knowledge work.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called it the “smartest generally-available model in the world” and shared benchmarks that showed it achieving higher scores than Gemini 3 Pro and Anthopic’s Claude Opus 4.5 in some software engineering tests and abstract reasoning, math, and science problems.

In a press release announcing the new model, the company said: “Overall, GPT‑5.2 brings significant improvements in general intelligence, long-context understanding, agentic tool-calling, and vision — making it better at executing complex, real-world tasks end-to-end than any previous model.”