Tag: Comma.ai

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George Hotz, hacker and long-time frenemy of Elon Musk, signs on for 12 weeks at Twitter

A lot has been made of Twitter’s shrinking workforce, which is reportedly down to 2,300 people down from the 7,500 employed by the company when new owner Elon Musk took control.

While we posited that the newest wave of departures was part of Musk’s master plan to shrink down the company, many worry about the haphazard ways it has been downsized. Insider reported on Friday, for example, that Twitter’s payroll department was decimated last week when employees who were given a stark ultimatum by Musk opted to bounce.

Still, Musk has plenty of supporters who want to help him improve Twitter, and he apparently just brought one into the fold on a short-term basis: George Hotz, the security hacker known for developing iOS jailbreaks and reverse engineering the PlayStation 3 before later founding Comma.ai, whose driver assistance system startup aims to bring Tesla Autopilot-like functionality to other cars.

Hotz definitely falls into the category of people-who-wouldn’t-be-on-your-remake-of-Twitter bingo board. Hotz founded Comma.ai after getting into a fight with Musk after Musk allegedly tried to hire him at Tesla but “kept changing the terms,” as Hotz told Bloomberg in 2015. At the time, Tesla said Hotz’s bold claims that his tech could beat that of Autopilot was “extremely unlikely.” Hotz promptly set out to prove Musk and the rest of Tesla wrong.

So why team up now? For one thing, Hotz has a little extra time on his hands right now. As TechCrunch reported early this month, Hotz considers that some of his own work at Comma.ai is done for the moment. It currently sells a $1,999 driver assistance system developer kit that is compatible on more than 200 vehicles; the company is also on solid ground as it looks to turn its devkit into a productized consumer product, he told TechCrunch.

The momentum gives him a little space to explore. “I’m good at things when it’s wartime,” Hotz told TechCrunch for that story. “I’m not so good at hands-on, ok, let’s patiently scale this up. ‘Do you want to deal with a supply chain that’s capable of making 100,000 devices a year?’ Like, not really.”

Hotz may also want to again prove his mettle to Musk. Indeed, last week, after tweeting out his support of Musk’s offer to Twitter employees (Musk said they could work “long hours at high intensity” or take three months of severance), Hotz further tweeted that he would be “down for a 12-week internship at Twitter for the cost of living in SF.”

Musk soon tweeted in response, “Sure, let’s talk.”

And just like that, the New Jersey has started his “internship,” he said today on the platform. It sounds like a hefty internship at that. As Hotz describes it on Twitter, he’s in charge of search for the social media outfit.

He is half-kiddingly giving himself reachable goals given that time commitment, joking today that “[I]f I just get rid of the pop up I still consider my internship a win. I have a chrome extension on my laptop to block it. [R]eminds me of the guy who got a job at Apple, made Wallet automatically delete your expired boarding passes, and quit the next week.”

While Hotz is a comparatively glitzy new hire, the idea right now generally is to layer in talent, Musk suggested today at an all-hands meeting at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters, according to Insider. Reportedly, Musk said during the meeting that no more layoffs are “planned” to happen.

According to The Verge, Musk also said that Twitter is now actively recruiting for roles in engineering and sales and that employees are encouraged to make referrals. (As The Verge notes, it’s a lot harder to get confirmation from Twitter given that its entire public relations department has been disbanded.)

For his part, Hotz also seems to be recruiting on behalf of his new, if short-term, employer, including reaching out to recent rivals. Today, specifically, Hotz asked Andrej Karpathy, a former director of AI at Tesla who led the computer vision team of Tesla Autopilot, if he wanted a job at Tesla after Karpathy weighed in with an answer to a question Hotz posed.

Hotz’s question? “How do you feel the quality of Twitter search is? What would get you to use Twitter search instead of Google?” Karpathy’s answer: “I search twitter on google with site: https://twitter.com/. Works quite well.”

George Hotz, hacker and long-time frenemy of Elon Musk, signs on for 12 weeks at Twitter by Connie Loizos originally published on TechCrunch

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George Hotz, aka ‘geohot,’ is leaving Comma.ai for a lofty AI project

Four years ago, Comma.ai founder George Hotz turned to his board — of which he is the only member — and fired himself as CEO. At the time, the goal for the famed iPhone and PlayStation 3 hacker, known as geohot, was to build out a new research division to focus on behavioral models that can drive cars.

Now, Hotz says he is taking “some time away” from the driver assistance system startup that promises to bring Tesla Autopilot-like functionality to your car. Although, he will remain its sole board member and president.

Hotz hasn’t been involved in the much of the day-to-day leaderships task for some time, he told TechCrunch. That has fallen to COO Alex Matzner and CTO Harald Schäfer. The company hasn’t had a CEO since 2019 when Riccardo Biasini held that role. (Biasini left the CEO post in 2019 and remained at Comma to work on its open pilot software until February 2020.)

Hotz has been what Matzner described an observer and occasional hard problem solver.

Comma.ai, which developed and now sells a $1,999 driver assistance system devkit that is compatible on more than 200 vehicles, isn’t going anywhere, Hotz told TechCrunch. The focus now is turning the devkit, which runs on Comma’s open source software called openpilot, into a productized consumer product.

“I’m good at things when it’s wartime,” Hotz told TechCrunch in a recent interview. “I’m not so good at hands-on, ok, let’s patiently scale this up. ‘Do you want to deal with a supply chain that’s capable of making 100,000 devices a year?’ Like, not really.”

And that’s one of the goals: annual sales of 100,000 Comma 3 units.

The startup quietly raised $10 million from individuals last year and moved into a 20,000-square-foot facility in San Diego. (Comma’s first $8.1 million in funding was taken in two rounds from Silicon Valley VC a16z.)  It is now “aggressively hiring” and on track to launch some major end-to-end machine learning updates to openpilot later this month, Matzner told TechCrunch in a recent email.

Comma.ai initially launched with a plan to sell a $999 aftermarket self-driving car kit that would give certain vehicle models highway-driving assistance abilities similar to Tesla’s Autopilot feature. Hotz canceled those plans in October 2016 after receiving a letter from the National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration. Five weeks later, Comma.ai released its self-driving software to the world. All of the code, as well as plans for the hardware, was posted on GitHub.

The company continued to develop an ecosystem of hardware products all aimed at bringing semi-autonomous driving capabilities to cars. Those efforts have culminated into the Comma 3, which is priced between $1,999 and $2,499 depending on the storage size. The car harness, which connects the devkit to the vehicle, is another $200.

The Comma 3 is far easier to use than its earlier iterations. It requires some patience to install and set up, but no longer requires any technical expertise anymore, Hotz said. Now, it’s up to the company to take the Comma 3 and make into a “productized” and scalable consumer product, he added.

What’s next?

Hotz is already deep into his next project, which he calls Tiny Corporation. His aim is to write a new framework for machine learning that is faster and less complex than PyTorch. Instead of training the ML model in the cloud and shipping it to the edge, Hotz wants to build tools that allow ML models to be trained at the edge.

“The current PyTorch and TensorFlow are not going to cut it for training the edge,” he said.

AI-related fields including automated driving are turning more to deep neural networks — a sophisticated form of artificial intelligence algorithms that allow a computer to learn by using a series of connected networks to identify patterns in data…  sort of how a brain works. But as Hotz notes, “we’re all pretty new to this neural network stuff.”

Andrej Karpathy, a deep learning and computer vision expert and former director of AI at Tesla, has referred to this stage as programming 2.0, or Software 2.0, in which programming is done by example and humans are really only writing the general scaffolding. In other words, software that writes itself.

“You shouldn’t be building a (AI) chip until you can build software that outperforms or at least performs the same as PyTorch on Nvidia,” Hotz said. “As the build up to building AI chips, first let’s build the software.”

George Hotz, aka ‘geohot,’ is leaving Comma.ai for a lofty AI project by Kirsten Korosec originally published on TechCrunch

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Comma.ai’s George Hotz ousts George Hotz as CEO

Comma.ai’s board, of which founder George Hotz is the only member, is making changes at the autonomous driving startup: Hotz is no longer CEO of the company.

A new CEO, who Hotz declined to name, is expected to be announced Friday via the company’s Medium blog. He confirmed that the CEO is indeed a human and a “very talented one,” Hotz told TechCrunch.

Hotz, who gained worldwide fame under the hacker alias “geohot” when he cracked the iPhone and PlayStation 3 as a teenager, isn’t leaving the company he founded. Instead, Hotz and two others are part of a new division called Comma.ai research that will focus on building out behavioral models that can drive cars.

Comma.ai found the “right product market fit” during his three-year tenure as CEO, Hotz said.

“We have very good growth numbers, now it’s time to get the slope on growth even higher,” said Hotz, who is the company’s majority shareholder. “It’s much more of an execution problem now than a vision problem. And perhaps I’m not the best executor.”

Hotz said the company needed someone to scale the team from the 15 people who are there now to the “50 required to put out a real consumer product,” as well as work on reducing cost of the product and deal with regulators.

Hotz may be out as CEO, but he insists the fundamental ethos of the company won’t change.

“We’ve always been the North Korea of self-driving companies; we are driven by nobody else’s agenda,” he said. “That’s not going to change.”

And he’s still interested in self-driving cars.

“Eventually, what I want to do with my life is I want to solve AI,” Hotz said. “And I think that self-driving cars are still the coolest applied AI problem today.”

Comma.ai initially aimed to sell a $999 aftermarket self-driving car kit that would give certain vehicle models highway-driving assistance abilities similar to Tesla’s Autopilot feature. Hotz canceled those plans in October 2016 after receiving a letter from the National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration.

Five weeks later, Comma.ai released its self-driving software to the world. All of the code, as well as plans for the hardware, was posted on GitHub.

Today, Comma.ai has an ecosystem of products — the Eon, Panda and Giraffe — all aimed at bringing semi-autonomous driving capabilities to cars. Drivers who buy and install them in their cars can bypass the driver-assistance systems in specific vehicles — right now late-model Hondas and Toyotas — and run Comma.ai’s open-source driving software instead.

The Eon is a dashcam dev kit based on Android that can run Waze, Spotify and Comma.ai’s open-source dashcam app chffrplus, which lets car owners record and review their drives. The Panda is a $99 universal car interface that plugs into a vehicle’s OBD-II port and gives users access to the internal communications networks (known as a vehicle bus) that interconnects components in a vehicle.

The Giraffe is an adapter board that gives users access to other CAN buses not exposed on the main OBD-II connector. This allows commands to be issued to the car via software.

Pull all of these together and a vehicle has Comma.ai’s version of lane-keeping and adaptive cruise control. TechCrunch rode in one of these Comma.ai-equipped vehicles in July.

More than 500 cars are now using either open pilot or chffr, Hotz said, adding that this fleet is sending data back to Comma.ai. The company has collected more than 5 million miles of driving data.

“We’re using all of that data to create behavioral models of human driving,” Hotz said. “We’re now very good at localizing that driving data, figuring out exactly where the car actually went. So from that and the data, how do we actually train models to drive like humans.”

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Comma.ai raises $5 million

Transportation startup Comma.ai has raised $5 million, according to a new SEC filing.

George Hotz, the founder of Comma.ai, started the company in an attempt to take on Tesla. Initially, Hotz was working on a self-driving car kit called Comma One. The Comma One was an add-on that would’ve enabled certain cars to have Tesla Autopilot-like driving assistance capabilities.

But Hotz cancelled that project following a warning letter from the National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration pertaining regulatory compliance. Comma One is now only available as an open-source project.

Last July, Hotz launched an $88 universal car interface called Panda. Panda plugs into your car’s OBD port to collect and record your driving data. At the time, Holtz described it to TC’s Sarah Buhr as a Fitbit for your car.