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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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Astronomer HR chief Kristin Cabot resigns following Coldplay ‘kiss cam’ incident

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Astronomer HR chief Kristin Cabot resigns following Coldplay 'kiss cam' incident

Chris Martin of Coldplay performs live at San Siro Stadium, Milan, Italy, in July 2017.

Mairo Cinquetti | NurPhoto | Getty Images

Days after Astronomer CEO Andy Byron resigned from the tech startup, the HR exec who was with him at the infamous Coldplay concert has left as well.

“Kristin Cabot is no longer with Astronomer, she has resigned,” a company spokesperson wrote in an email to CNBC Thursday. Cabot was the company’s chief people officer.

Cabot and Byron, who is married with children, were shown in an intimate moment on the ‘kiss cam’ at a recent Coldplay show in Boston, and immediately hid when they saw their faces on the big screen. Lead singer Chris Martin said, “Either they’re having an affair or they’re just very shy.” An attendee’s video of the incident went viral.

Byron resigned from the company on Saturday. Both Cabot and Byron have been removed the company’s leadership team webpage.

Pete DeJoy, Astronomer’s interim CEO, wrote in a post earlier this week that recent and unexpected national attention has turned the company into “a household name.”

In May, the New York-based company, which commercializes open source software, announced a $93 million investment round led by Bain Ventures and other investors, including Salesforce Ventures.

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Musk’s Starlink hit with outage day after rollout of T-Mobile satellite service

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Musk's Starlink hit with outage day after rollout of T-Mobile satellite service

Jakub Porzycki | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Elon Musk‘s satellite internet service Starlink said it had a “network outage” on Thursday. The company said it was working on a solution.

There were more than 60,000 reports of an outage on Downdetector, a site that logs issues.

Starlink is owned and operated by SpaceX, which is also run by Musk.

Musk apologized for the outage on his social media platform X and said, “Service will be restored shortly.”

Musk posted earlier Thursday that the company’s direct-to-cell-phone service was “growing fast” following the announcement that T-Mobile‘s Starlink-powered satellite service was available to the public.

T-Mobile said the T-Satellite service was built to keep phones connected “in places no carrier towers can reach.”

Starlink didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Starlink internet speeds and reliability decrease with popularity, a recent study found.

It wasn’t immediately clear if the T-Satellite service was affected by or involved in the outage.

Read more CNBC tech news

CNBC’s Lora Kolodny contributed to this story.

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Intel beats on revenue, slashes foundry investments as CEO says ‘no more blank checks’

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Intel beats on revenue, slashes foundry investments as CEO says 'no more blank checks'

The Intel logo is displayed on a sign in front of Intel headquarters on July 16, 2025 in Santa Clara, California.

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

Intel reported second-quarter results on Thursday that beat Wall Street expectations on revenue, as the company’s new CEO Lip-Bu Tan announced significant cuts in chip factory construction. The stock ticked higher in extended trading.

Here’s how the chipmaker did versus LSEG consensus estimates:

  • Earnings per share: Loss of 10 cents per share, adjusted.
  • Revenue: $12.86 billion versus $11.92 billion estimated

Intel said it expects revenue for the third-quarter of $13.1 billion at the midpoint of its range, versus the average analyst estimate of $12.65 billion. The chipmaker said that it expects to break even on earnings while analysts were looking for earnings of 4 cents per share.

For the second quarter, Intel reported a net loss of $2.9 billion, or 67 cents per share, compared with a $1.61 billion net loss, or 38 cents per share, in the year-earlier period. Earnings per share were not comparable to analyst estimates due to an $800 million impairment charge, “related to excess tools with no identified re-use,” the company said. That resulted in an EPS adjustment of about 20 cents.

The report was Intel’s second since Lip-Bu Tan took over as CEO in March, promising to make the chipmaker’s products competitive again, and to reduce bureaucracy and layers of management, including slashing staff in Oregon and California.

In a memo to employees published on Thursday, Tan said that the first few months of his tenure had “not been easy.” He said that the company had “completed the majority” of its planned layoffs, amounting to 15% of the workforce, and that it plans to end the year with 75,000 employees. Intel previously said it was trying to reduce operating expenses by $17 billion in 2025.

Intel shares are up about 13% this year as of Thursday’s close after plummeting 60% in 2024, their worst year on record.

Tan also announced several other spending cuts in the memo, particularly in the company’s costly foundry division, which makes chips for other companies and is still looking for a big customer to anchor the business.

Intel said its foundry business had an operating loss of $3.17 billion on $4.4 billion in revenue.

Tan said that Intel had cancelled planned fab projects in Germany and Poland, and will consolidate its testing and assembly operations in Vietnam and Malaysia. He added that the company would slow down the pace of its construction of a cutting-edge chip factory in Ohio, depending on market demand and if it can secure big customers for the facility.

“Over the past several years, the company invested too much, too soon – without adequate demand,” Tan wrote. “In the process, our factory footprint became needlessly fragmented and underutilized.”

Tan wrote that the company’s forthcoming chip manufacturing process, called 14A, will be built out based on confirmed customer commitments.

“There are no more blank checks. Every investment must make economic sense,” Tan wrote.

The company’s client computing group, which is primarily comprised of sales of central processors for PCs, had $7.9 billion in sales, down 3% on an annual basis.

Revenue in the data center group, which includes some AI chips but is mostly central processors for servers, rose 4% to $3.9 billion. Tan wrote in his memo that Intel wants to regain market share in data center chips, and is looking for a permanent leader for the business. Longtime rival Advanced Micro Devices has increasingly been winning server business from cloud customers.

Tan added he would personally review and approve all chip designs before they are taped out, which is the final step of the design process before a new chip is manufactured.

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