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Tesla CEO Elon Musk gestures as he visits the construction site of Tesla’s Gigafactory in Gruenheide near Berlin, Germany, August 13, 2021.
Patrick Pleul | Reuters

Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Monday called the latest release of the company’s experimental driver assistance software, FSD Beta 9.2, “actually not great” on Twitter.

Specifically, Musk wrote:

“FSD Beta 9.2 is actually not great imo, but Autopilot/AI team is rallying to improve as fast as possible. We’re trying to have a single stack for both highway & city streets, but it requires massive NN retraining.”

The company sells a Full Self-Driving capability (or FSD) package for $10,000 or $199 per month in the US. This premium driver assistance system does not make Tesla electric vehicles safe for use without an attentive driver behind the wheel.

FSD Beta is available only to some drivers who previously purchased FSD and Tesla employees. The beta version features new or newly revised functionality that is added to the car’s premium driver assistance features.

Drivers usually agree to keep their experiences private, though some public FSD Beta users are allowed to post videos to social media showing off and critiquing the latest features that they have tried on U.S. roads.

Regulators may one day decide to disallow vehicle testing with drivers who are not trained professionals on public roads. But for now, no regulation interferes with Tesla’s ability to turn their customers, and everyone they share the road with, into guinea pigs.

Musk’s critical tweet on Monday came just days after he touted Tesla’s prowess with autonomous systems and components for them at an event called Tesla AI Day.

At that event, last week on Thursday, Tesla showed off a custom chip for training artificial-intelligence networks in data centers. The chips are meant to train models for automatically identifying a variety of obstacles that appear on the road in video feeds recorded by cameras inside Tesla vehicles.

Among other things, FSD today is sold with the promise of enabling a Tesla vehicle to automatically change lanes, navigate on the highway, move into a parking spot, or emerge from one and drive across a small distance to the driver’s side at a slow pace without anyone behind the wheel.

Tesla says later this year FSD will also include the ability to automatically steer on city streets, a long-delayed feature. FSD Beta has included the auto steer on city streets feature, albeit it imperfect and incomplete.

Musk’s critical tweet also follows the launch of a formal investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot system by federal vehicle safety authorities in the US last week.

Autopilot is the basic version of Tesla’s driver assistance system, and today it comes as a standard part of their cars.

Tesla vehicles with Autopilot, or just traffic aware cruise control features engaged, crashed into first responder vehicles at least 11 times in the US, NHTSA found, leaving at least 17 people injured and 1 dead. That prompted the formal probe into whether Autopilot contains safety defects that NHTSA may require Tesla to change.

Additionally, late last week, NTSB’s newly appointed chairwoman Jennifer Homendy, said in an interview with Bloomberg, “Whether it’s Tesla or anyone else, it is incumbent on these manufacturers to be honest in what their technology does and does not do.”

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Amazon’s advertising business grew 19% in the third quarter

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Amazon's advertising business grew 19% in the third quarter

Dominika Zarzycka | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Amazon’s online advertising business brought in $14.3 billion in the third quarter, up 19% year over year, in line with analysts’ estimates of $14.3 billion.

The Seattle tech giant revealed the financial results of its growing advertising unit as part of its latest earnings report Thursday. Amazon’s overall third-quarter sales were $158.9 billion, ahead of analysts’ estimates of $157.2 billion.

Amazon’s online advertising business is still a fraction of the company’s overall business, but its growth over the years has made it a major competitor to Alphabet and Meta, which lead the digital advertising market. Alphabet’s Google currently represents 27.7% of the worldwide digital advertising market, followed by Meta at 22.8% and Amazon with 8.8%, according to data provided to CNBC by Emarketer.

Meta’s third-quarter advertising revenue came in at $39.9 billion, which was up 19% compared with the year prior. That was slightly ahead of analysts’ expectations of $39.49 billion, according to StreetAccount. Ads accounted for 98.3% of Meta’s overall third-quarter revenue.

Alphabet generated $65.85 billion in third-quarter ad revenue, the company reported Tuesday. That was up 10% from $59.65 billion the year prior. Additionally, advertising sales for the company’s YouTube unit rose 12% year over year to $8.92 billion.

Jefferies' Brent Thill on Microsoft & Meta earnings: AI expectations for investors got overinflated

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Intel shares jump 9% on earnings beat, uplifting guidance

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Intel shares jump 9% on earnings beat, uplifting guidance

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger holds an artificial intelligence processor as he speaks during the Computex conference in Taipei, Taiwan, on June 4, 2024.

Annabelle Chih | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Intel shares rose 9% in extended trading on Thursday after the chipmaker reported better-than-expected revenue and issued quarterly guidance that topped estimates.

Here’s how the company did in comparison with LSEG consensus:

  • Earnings per share: Loss of 46 cents adjusted
  • Revenue: $13.28 billion vs. $13.02 billion expected

Intel’s revenue declined 6% year over year in the quarter, which ended on Sept. 28, according to a statement. The company registered a net loss of $16.99 billion, or $3.88 per share, compared with net earnings of $310 million, or 7 cents per share, in the same quarter a year ago.

As part of its cost reduction plan, Intel recognized $2.8 billion in restructuring charges during the quarter. There were also $15.9 billion in impairment charges.

Intel has been mired in an extended slump due to market share losses in its core businesses and an inability to crack artificial intelligence. CEO Pat Gelsinger revealed plans during the quarter to turn the company’s foundry business into an independent subsidiary, a move that would enable outside funding options.

CNBC reported that Intel had engaged advisors to defend itself against activist investors. In late September, news surfaced that Qualcomm reached out to Intel about a possible takeover.

The Client Computing Group that sells PC chips recorded $7.33 billion in revenue, down about 7% from a year earlier and below the $7.39 billion consensus among analysts surveyed by StreetAccount.

Revenue from the Data Center and AI segment came to $3.35 billion, which was up about 9% and more than the $3.17 billion consensus from StreetAccount.

Intel called for fiscal third-quarter adjusted earnings of 12 cents per share and revenue between $13.3 billion and $14.3 billion. Analysts had expected 8 cents in adjusted earnings per share and $13.66 billion in revenue.

During the quarter, Intel announced the launch of Xeon 6 server processors and Gaudi artificial intelligence accelerators.

As of Thursday’s close, Intel shares were down about 57% in 2024, while the S&P 500 index had gained 20%.

Executives will discuss the results with analysts on a conference call starting at 5 p.m. ET.

This is breaking news. Please check back for updates.

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Microsoft’s stock has worst day in two years after disappointing forecast

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Microsoft's stock has worst day in two years after disappointing forecast

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks at a company event on artificial intelligence technologies in Jakarta, Indonesia, on April 30, 2024.

Dimas Ardian | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Microsoft‘s better-than-expected earnings report wasn’t enough to prevent the stock’s steepest sell-off in two years, as investors instead focused on the company’s forecast for the current period.

Microsoft shares fell 6% on Thursday and headed for their worst day since Oct. 26, 2022, when they dropped 7.7%. That was a month before the public release of ChatGPT from Microsoft-backed OpenAI, a launch that set the stage for a boom in artificial intelligence investments.

For the period ending in December, Microsoft called for revenue in the range of $68.1 billion to $69.1 billion, implying 10.6% growth at the middle of the range. Analysts surveyed by LSEG were looking for $69.83 billion in revenue.

Revenue in Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure business, Azure, increased 33%. CFO Amy Hood said on a call with analysts that growth, in constant currency, will come in at 31% to 32% in the fiscal second quarter.

On Tuesday, Google reported 35% annual growth in its rival cloud business to $11.35 billion. Amazon, which leads the cloud infrastructure market, is scheduled to report results after the close on Thursday.

“We view Q1 results as solid across the core Azure and Office growth businesses, though tempered by a softer Q2 outlook,” analysts at BofA Global Research wrote in a report on Thursday. They still recommend buying the stock.

Fiscal first-quarter revenue increased 16% from a year earlier to $65.59 billion, exceeding the average analyst estimate of $64.51 billion, according to LSEG. Earnings per share of $3.30 topped the $3.10 average estimate.

Net income rose 11% to $24.67 billion from $22.29 billion in the year-ago quarter.

Jefferies' Brent Thill on Microsoft & Meta earnings: AI expectations for investors got overinflated

Outside suppliers are late in delivering data center infrastructure to Microsoft, meaning the company won’t be able to meet demand in the fiscal second quarter.

“I feel pretty good that going into the second half of even this fiscal year, that some of that supply-demand will match up,” CEO Satya Nadella said on the earnings call.

Microsoft’s AI investments continue to be a major focus for investors, as the company builds out its infrastructure and ramps up chip spending to handle heftier workloads. Microsoft has invested close to $14 billion in OpenAI, which was valued at $157 billion in a financing round earlier this month.

Hood said on the call she expects the company to take a $1.5 billion hit to income in the current period, mainly because of an expected loss from its investment in the AI startup.

Meanwhile, spending on property and equipment grew 50% year over year to $14.92 billion. The consensus among analysts polled by Capital IQ was $14.58 billion.

As of Thursday’s close, Microsoft shares were up a little over 8% for the year, while the Nasdaq has risen 21% during the same period.

— CNBC’s Ari Levy contributed to this report.

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