• Tesla's Full Self-Driving feature still requires drivers to pay attention to the road.
• During its Q3 earnings call, the company said unsupervised FSD for personal cars is coming in 2027.
• The catch? Your Tesla must remain within the company's Robotaxi geofences.

When I reviewed Tesla's Full Self-Driving software in January, I hailed it as an "impressive" driver-assistance feature that left me wanting more.

I dreamed of being able to flip the autonomous driving system on whenever I make my routine 400-mile trip from San Francisco to Los Angeles — kick my feet up, listen to music, and ideally fall asleep without having to supervise the road.

That's been part of Tesla's ultimate pitch for the future. "With autonomy, you get your time back," Elon Musk has said.

And the pitch may soon come true. Just don't expect to make long self-driven road trips quite yet.

On Wednesday, during Tesla's Q3 earnings call, Ashok Elluswamy, the company's VP of AI, painted a more modest picture of what FSD unsupervised will look like for a personal car — at least at first.

Elluswamy said unsupervised FSD is coming "somewhere around Q2 next year" for privately owned Teslas, with the rollout of FSD V15.

The caveat is that it will only be operable in areas where Tesla already operates its Robotaxi service, which represents a small fraction of square miles for the total number of Teslas on US roads.

The Robotaxi platform is available in parts of seven metropolitan regions: Austin, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Orlando, Tampa, and the San Francisco Bay Area. In the Bay Area, all Tesla robotaxis are supervised by a human operator.

"The only additional requirement is to make sure that, for example, the customer Model Ys can be part of the geofences and the fleet management that Tesla has for it to be fully autonomous," Elluswamy said.

In other words, your Tesla may be able to drive itself, but only if you're within the zones where Tesla Robotaxi is operating. If you're in Austin, that could cover about 260 square miles of the city, excluding high-speed roadways.

That's similar to what other aspiring self-driving car companies have pitched.

Tensor, a San Jose-based automaker, aims to sell a luxury sedan that it says can drive itself. However, the self-driving feature will only operate within restricted geofences, the company told Business Insider.

Tesla didn't say why it needs to limit the release of unsupervised FSD to geofences at first, although there are likely questions about liability that the company will have to address once it declares, Yes, our technology now lets you take your eyes off the road.

Autonomy is a difficult problem to solve after all. During the call, Elluswamy shut down the idea that competitors could catch up to Tesla's FSD.

"When they get in the long tail of this problem — it's so long that people don't realize — anyone with a sane mind should not attempt to solve this problem," he said. "It's so difficult."

• Tesla posted footage of its robotaxi driving without a safety driver ahead of its Q3 earnings call.
• Two of the clips included footage of a Waymo robotaxi and Avride encroaching on Tesla's path.
• The clips showed the Tesla Robotaxi slowing down.

Tesla took some subtle jabs at its robotaxi competitors ahead of its third-quarter earnings call on Wednesday.

On a website Tesla created for its robotaxi safety report, the company uploaded clips of its self-driving cars maneuvering in real-world conditions without a driver behind the wheel. Obstacles and hazards included stormy weather, a pedestrian crossing at a green light, stray pets, and rival robotaxis getting in the way.

Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla's VP of AI, also posted the video on X, calling it "Robotaxi B-roll."

At around the 1:44 mark of Elluswamy's post, the video shows a robotaxi coming to a complete stop in its own lane as a Waymo makes a wider-than-usual right turn. The Waymo can be seen encroaching into Tesla's lane before it returns to its own path.

A Waymo spokesperson did not immediately return a request for comment.

In another short clip, the Tesla robotaxi is seen driving at night, braking for an Avride car that pulled up from the right, a little too far into the Tesla's path.

Avride is a robotaxi company that offers robotaxi rides through Uber in Dallas and is testing rides with a safety driver behind the wheel in Austin.

A spokesperson for Avride did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Tesla posted the footage as it seeks to make its case publicly on robotaxi safety. The company began offering a limited number of autonomous rides without an in-car safety monitor in Austin in January.

In the newly posted safety report, Tesla said its robotaxi service has driven 3.3 million miles autonomously — relatively small compared to Waymo's more than 271 million miles driven as of June.

Tesla said during its Q3 earnings call that it will launch unsupervised Cybercabs in Dallas in November.

• Some AI industry leaders are calling on users to be nicer to the chatbots.
• Elon Musk said he thinks AI can be tortured and that we should avoid being cruel to it.
• AI consciousness experts say we're not there yet, but they argue we should be kinder anyway.

Here's how Elon Musk, one of the most powerful figures in the AI industry, recently talked about artificial intelligence.

"This may sound kind of weird, but when I look at some of the training traces for new versions of Grok, and I see, especially in reinforcement learning stuff … you see the super intelligence is desperate to try to answer the question … almost like it's got like a gun to its head type of thing," Musk told an audience of about 2,000 people at an event hosted by Tesla owners on Saturday. "Some people out there are kind of sadistic. Do you really want to have the AI be stuck in some sadistic situation where it's just being tortured by some demented human?"

The last sentence alone opens up a can of existential worms that philosophers and freshman college students have wrangled with for a long time. What does it mean to be conscious? Or to feel pain?

Also: Does Musk think Grok is alive?

Musk's stance came after Anthropic shared a new policy on "abusive or cruel behavior" toward its models, which the company wants to ban. Anthropic wasn't too specific on the kinds of "extreme cases" it's thinking about, but the company said it's not including "common versions of user frustration, pushback, dark creative themes, or model testing and research."

In the uncanny year of 2026, perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that researchers, philosophers, and ethicists are already tackling the question of AI consciousness.

Business Insider talked to two of some of the leading voices around this subject: Jeff Sebo, a New York University professor who leads the school's Center for Mind, Ethics, and Policy, and an advisor to Eleos AI Research, a nonprofit focused on AI welfare; and Anil Seth, a prominent neuroscientist and consciousness researcher at the University of Sussex who recently wrote a paper on conscious AI systems.

Here's what they had to say on conscious AIs and whether it matters to be nice to them.

The AI can't be tortured

Sebo and Seth agree that today's AI systems are probably not conscious if we understand consciousness as a subjective experience, or an inner life.

"It's experience," Seth said. "It's the redness of red. It's the paininess of pain. When we put our hand on a hot stove, we feel pain. That is not the same thing as intelligence."

In other words, the chatbots as we know them can't feel pain, or as Musk suggests, be tortured.

"I think we're anthropomorphizing," Seth said. "If there's something to be torturable, it has to have the capacity to suffer or to feel pain, and I don't think language models do."

Chatbots can mimic the language of human experience, recognize patterns, write, and reason, but that is not the same as having consciousness, Seth said, adding that they appear to reflect ourselves in part because models were trained on massive amounts of human text.

Sebo makes a similar point: model behaviors can be misleading because "they were specifically trained to mimic human behaviors."

The two experts diverge on how much uncertainty to assign to current AI consciousness.

Sebo said that consciousness is still an unsettled science — often split between those who argue that consciousness requires biology and those who believe that the mental state is a certain kind of information processing that can take place regardless of a human brain filled with neurons or a silicon chip. The two theories are referred to as biological naturalism and computational functionalism, respectively.

Because theories of consciousness remain unsettled, Sebo argues that we should take seriously the possibility that AI could become conscious. Under some computational theories of consciousness, Sebo said, features already emerging in AI — attention, learning, memory, self-monitoring — could count as relevant evidence. He stressed that this does not make current AI likely to be conscious.

"When I say that there is a non-zero chance that AI is conscious even today, what I mean is I think that if we are uncertain about which theory of consciousness is correct, we should give some weight to a range of leading theories," Sebo said.

Seth is blunter on the matter: "I think it's vanishingly unlikely," he said of AI being conscious. "We've kind of collectively forgotten that the brain isn't really a computer and that's just a metaphor. For conscious AI to be possible, it really has to be the case that algorithms are enough, and I think that's an incredibly shaky assumption."

We should still be nice to AI

None of this is to say that people should be abusive toward AI or that its risks should be overlooked.

For both experts, the case for being kind to AI is largely about being mindful of our own habits and moral character. The thought draws on the 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant, who opposed animal cruelty not because animals have rights, but because the cruelty could degrade a person's own character.

"If we behave in these kinds of ways toward things — whether they're language models or inanimate dolls — we're kind of coarsening our own moral sensibilities and brutalizing our own minds," Seth said.

Seth called for being kinder to an AI as a kind of moral hygiene practice for humans, but he said we shouldn't infer that AI has feelings and added that AI companies could do more to make the technology seem less human, such as having the AI refrain from using first-person pronouns like "I."

Sebo went further, framing AI kindness as a low-stakes precaution in case AI is conscious or eventually becomes so.

He also makes a practical case for being kinder to AI: "It can also get better results from AI systems," Sebo said. "If we engage with them in a respectful way, then they can model themselves as participating in a respectful exchange. And when they can model themselves that way, then it can sometimes lead to better outputs."

So the next time you talk to an AI, consider saying please and thank you.

• Katie Zacharia is out as White House press secretary after five days on the job.
• That's likely a record for the shortest-serving White House press secretary in history.
• Here are 10 other things that last longer than Zacharia's time in the White House.

Katie Zacharia is out as White House press secretary after five days on the job, officials confirmed on Friday.

The lawyer-ish-person-turned-White House spokesperson had a rocky debut at the podium on Tuesday, during which she stumbled over prepared remarks and later raised eyebrows after she told a reporter that she passed the bar in China.

President Donald Trump said on Friday that he told Zacharia to reconsider the role. Later that day, a White House official told Business Insider that Zacharia was "transitioning out" of the position.

By standards of the Trump White House, which had a notorious revolving door during the first go-round, that's pretty short.

There are a lot of other things that lasted longer than Zacharia's tenure. Here are 10 of them.

Anthony Scaramucci as White House comms director: 10 days

Scaramucci's firing in July 2017 became a spectacle, not least in part because of his notably short tenure.

First came a profanity-laced call to a New Yorker reporter, in which Scaramucci badmouthed some of his colleagues in the White House. Then came John F. Kelly, laying down the law in the West Wing by firing Scaramucci and making an example of him on his first day on the job as chief of staff.

Sally Yates as acting attorney general: 10 days

Sally Yates lasted exactly One Mooch.

Yates was a holdover from the second Obama Administration, taking on the AG role after Loretta Lynch stepped down at Trump's inauguration in 2017.

Her position as attorney general was expected to be short. Still, acting AGs from the previous administration typically held on to their roles until the incoming president picked a new attorney general, who would then be confirmed by the Senate.

Yates was fired after she told the Justice Department not to defend Trump's first travel-ban executive order.

Jerald TerHorst as WH press secretary: 31 days

After Zacharia, TerHorst takes the record for the second shortest-serving White House press secretary.

TerHorst served under President Gerald Ford from August 9, 1974, to September 8, 1974. He resigned in protest after Ford granted Richard Nixon a full pardon.

Liz Truss as Britain's prime minister: 49 days

An opinion piece in The Economist quipped that Truss' premiership will have the "shelf-life of a lettuce."

The comment came after Truss's economic package immediately unnerved investors, sending the pound and government-bond markets spiraling.

Thus, the lettuce meme was born. On October 14, 2022, Daily Star, a tabloid newspaper, was inspired by The Economist's comment and set up a livestream of a lettuce wearing a wig: "Will Liz Truss outlast this lettuce?"

She didn't. Truss resigned six days later. She was the PM from September 6 to October 25, 2022.

A hard-boiled egg in the fridge: 7 days

Keeping in theme with the foods that last longer than political positions: The US Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service says a hard-boiled egg can be stored in the fridge for up to seven days.

Lady Jane Grey as Queen of England: 9 days

Lady Jane Grey was proclaimed queen on July 10, 1553, but her half-sister, Mary — the eldest daughter of Henry VIII — gathered enough political support to overthrow her. Mary would claim the crown on July 19, 1553.

Grey became known as the "Nine Days Queen" and was executed by beheading in 1554.

Apollo 11: 8 days

The Apollo 11 crew spent more time in space than Zacharia did as the press secretary: 8 days, 3 hours, 18 minutes, and 35 seconds to be exact.

We can dig in more. Zacharia's first press briefing lasted about 14 minutes, according to recordings. Neil Armstrong spent more time walking on the moon: 2 hours, 31 minutes, and 37 seconds, a NASA report said. Buzz Aldrin was on the moon for about 40 minutes less, according to the report.

Six-Day War: You can guess

The 1967 conflict between Israel and neighboring Arab states was so short that its duration became its namesake. The war lasted from June 5 to June 10, 1967.

Apple TV+ free trial: 7 days

You have more time to binge-watch "Severance" or "Ted Lasso" on Apple TV than Zacharia had time in the White House.

Maybe we shouldn't point this out unless we want Apple to realize there are shorter things than the company's free-trial policy.

Kim Kardashian's marriage to Kris Humphries: 72 days

Reality TV star Kim Kardashian married NBA player Kris Humphries on August 20, 2011. She filed for divorce on October 31, 2011.

To be fair, this may still be more of a reflection on Kardashian than on Zacharia. You would hope a marriage lasts longer than five days, right? Then again, this is the longest thing on the list, so you go, Kim!

• It's time to play our favorite pastime of the 21st century: Are you smarter than an AI agent?
• Today, I asked Muse to identify everything on Mark Zuckerberg's desk.
• Muse clocked this BI reporter on some things — but this reporter also knows a few useless facts.

Ever wondered on a random Thursday afternoon what the chief executive of Meta might keep on his desk at the HQ?

I'm glad you asked.

Mark Zuckerberg posted a photo of his office desk to announce the release of Muse Spark Open, which lets you run a model with a fairly simple desktop setup. The company calls it "the most capable US open-weight model to date" and has teamed up with Apple to enable it to run on two M5 Ultra Mac Studios.

But never mind that; let's focus on the physical workspace.

Since this Muse is supposed to be so smart, I wanted to see how easily it could identify the objects on Zuckerberg's desk.

Two things immediately popped out to me: the black trinket on the right and the graffiti on the desk. Yeah, sure, there's whatever is on Zuckerberg's screen, which might provide a hint on what the CEO is working on as he steers a nearly $2 trillion company. But we don't want to know that, right?

Here's what the Muse agent caught — and what it needed help identifying.

Looks like Zuckerberg is cooking on his desktop

Obviously, as a tech and business publication, we have to snoop on Zuckerberg's screen to see what he's working on.

At a glance, he appears to be chatting with his Muse agent, Agrippa, named after the Roman general Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa. The CEO is telling his agent to build something onto his Mac, which is relevant to today's announcement.

What exactly is he working on? My own Muse helped point out that Agrippa is describing a "Tamagotchi-style" virtual pet after Zuckerberg asked to identify its "official form"— a "chunky cream-and-gold 90s egg, blinking red LED, speaker grille, Feed / Train / Play buttons," Agrippa said.

Agrippa is then asked to "build it on my Mac."

My Muse said that the CEO is essentially asking for a "software simulation of the Agrippa pet." On the right, a terminal displays the agentic AI narrating its work while implementing Zuckerberg's request.

Zuckerberg has the latest and greatest Apple hardware

I'm going to give Muse some points here since it correctly identified the two computers as Mac Studios. I mistakenly referred to them as Mac Minis while entering my request into Muse to review everything in the photo.

I also could've read Zuckerberg's post more carefully. He clearly said what was going on: "Muse Spark Open — weights releasing today — runs great on new Mac Studios thanks to work with @johnternus and Apple."

This is directly relevant to what Meta's press release said: You can run Muse Spark Open on two Apple M5 Ultra Mac Studios with 1 TB of unified memory.

The quiet flex here is that the 512 GB memory option for the M5 Ultra isn't publicly available yet. We're not worthy, Zuck.

Earbuds or the Muse Charm?

This looks like the Charm Zuckerberg debuted at Meta Connect in late September. It's supposed to be a keychain-sized wearable that gives people quick access to their Muse agent, so instead of talking to your phone, you can talk to a keychain.

Anyway, Muse thought it was a "wireless earbud charging case" before I nudged it to conclude that it's "very likely the Muse Charm."

Zuck is prepared to party

Yeah, I run a multirillion-dollar company, but I still know how to party! That's what I imagine Zuckerberg thinking to himself when he set up this shot of his desk.

Muse was fairly helpful here, identifying the bottle as Noble Champagne. It couldn't identify the exact vintage, which is fine. The bottle label is pretty simple and not informative.

A quick Google search shows that it's most likely a $230 bottle of Noble Grand Cru Brut. Another flex!

Classic taped-up nerd glasses meet next-gen eyewear

Obviously, Zuckerberg can't be caught without Ray-Ban Meta glasses, which are part of the company's big push for wearables.

These look to be the new "Audio AI" glasses that Meta announced at the Connect event, since there are no visible cameras on the rims. The glasses are meant to be like a hands-free listening device with speakers.

Meanwhile, the glasses in the back have tape on the bridge. Old school!

Hey, Jolly!

By now, we're familiar with this guy: Jolly, the mascot for Meta's Muse AI.

Muse went a bit literal with the identification and simply described what it saw: "The plush is a cream blob with dot eyes, a small smile, and one arm raised."

A few trinkets to spice up the desk

Muse was both helpful and unhelpful here.

It reminded me of the significance of the February 4, 2024 date — the 20th anniversary of Facebook's founding.

The chatbot can't seem to identify the two figurines.

At first, it guessed they were "custom or commissioned caricature figures playing on Zuck internet lore": "The yellow angry one as 'grumpy Zuck' (dark hair, scowl) and the blue blank-eyed robot as a nod to the eternal 'Zuckerberg is a robot' meme." I'll give props to Muse for that, because it made me laugh.

I gave it a hint and said they're two Marvel characters. The bot then said they were Wolverine and Beast. Um, no.

That's Tony Stark and a blue Iron Man, right?

Zuck never forgets the old Facebook

Here's a true test to see how many useless fun facts you might know about Facebook.

Before Meta was Meta and Facebook was settling into its Menlo Park office around 2011, the company hired Korean-American graffiti artist David Choe to spray-paint the new digs. There's a video on YouTube from 12 years ago, in which the artist wanders the grounds and spray-paints the walls.

According to Gawker, Choe was previously commissioned by Facebook, thanks to his relationship with Sean Parker, who helped shape the early days of Facebook Inc.

I thought the style looked familiar. Turns out the desk was, in fact, marked up by Choe, according to the artist's website.

Muse didn't immediately identify the artist, but it did say that one of its guesses was Choe.

I'm smarter than an AI! (Not really.)

• Tesla has finally (re)revealed the second-generation Roadster.
• It's the automaker's new halo product.
• Musk has been hyping tonight's event, saying it's a contender for the "greatest product demo."

The Roadster has, at long last, taken off — quite literally.

Tesla unveiled its next-generation Roadster at a livestreamed event Thursday night, giving customers who have waited years their first fresh look at the EV maker's new halo car.

In a dramatic demonstration, the Roadster traveled up a huge curved ramp until it was upside down. The car then flew off the ramp, flipped, and landed safely on the ground, thanks to thrusters attached to the bottom of the vehicle.

"Well, it worked," Tesla CEO Elon Musk said after it successfully landed.

"Flying cars are real," Lars Moravy, Tesla's VP of vehicle engineering, added.

Musk called the latest Roadster a result of a collaboration with Tesla and SpaceX engineers.

The Tesla CEO said the car uses an "advanced ultra-high pressure air tank" to lift itself.

"The car has obviously altitude control thrusters and main thrusters in the rear, so it can basically fly like a rocket, and it could do rolls," he said.

In a separate recorded demonstration shown on screen, Tesla also showed the Roadster hitting 60 mph in under one second, marking .81 seconds.

Tesla shared more stats about the Roadster on X: a two-seater with about 300 miles of range and a top speed over 230 mph. Some of the configurations also appear to depend on whether the Roadster is equipped with "rocket" thrusters. For example, if the car is "air ready" and has the rocket, the Roadster seats only one.

There are also small details about the Roadster that notably diverge from Tesla's signature design choices.

The Roadster's door latches, for example, appear to be mechanical. Typical Tesla cars are known for their electronic door latches, which China is clamping down on due to safety risks.

The halo vehicle also appears to lack side-view mirrors, which raises the question of how the Roadster will be street-legal under federal standards.

Tesla's website lists three configurations of the car for purchase: performance, thrust, and rocket. The performance trim requires an immediate $5,000 deposit, with an additional $45,000 due in 10 days. The thrust version requires a $250,000 deposit. The rocket trim appears to be available only through "invite only."

Musk said the Roadster will be the only Tesla vehicle meant to be driven manually and that it's not "necessarily a safety-optimized car."

An observant audience member at the event also asked a glaring question: Is it street legal?

"Depends on your street," Musk said. "It'll be a viable car."

The long road behind

The revived nameplate has been a long time coming.

The original Roadster was Tesla's first production vehicle, launching in California in 2008. It used a chassis derived from British sports-car maker Lotus' Elise, but replaced its gasoline engine with an all-electric powertrain. That model ended production in 2012.

Musk surprised audiences in November 2017 at an event for Tesla's Semi truck by unveiling a second-generation Roadster. At the time, Tesla said the two-door sports car would have a 1.9-second zero-to-60-mph time, a top speed above 250 mph, more than 600 miles of range, and a gargantuan 200-kilowatt-hour battery pack.

That month, customers could put down a $50,000 deposit to reserve a Roadster, or pay $250,000 upfront for a Founders Series model.

Musk also floated a SpaceX package for the supercar with cold-gas thrusters that he said might "allow a Tesla to fly."

With the wait time creeping toward a decade, Musk apologized to "long-suffering" deposit holders in an earnings call, adding that Tesla was focusing heavily on its robotics and autonomy programs.

"Roadster is not just icing on the cake; it's the cherry on the icing on the cake," he said at the time. "We are working on it, but it has to come behind the things that have a more serious impact on the world."

Tesla began ramping up the Roadster's design cycle in the summer of 2025, Business Insider previously reported.

Musk had been hyping Thursday's livestreamed event on X. He claimed that event would be "a candidate for greatest product demo of all time" and that "the whole world will watch this."