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George Hotz

Original nameGeorge Hotz

American Programmer, Founder of comma.ai

The Names Remembered · Small Roles, Famous Names

The Early Realization of the iPhone JailbreakThe comma.ai Open-Source Self-Driving ProjectEarly Head of Tesla’s Self-Driving Vision Team

Who they are

George Hotz is an American programmer who in 2007 as a teenager became the first person in the world to successfully jailbreak the iPhone, and thereafter was long active in the hacker and open-source technology community. In 2015 he founded comma.ai, trying to develop a relatively low-cost open-source self-driving assistance system for ordinary consumers. In 2016 he briefly joined Tesla to head the self-driving vision team, but over a disagreement with Elon Musk on technical path and project management left the company after only a few months, and thereafter continued his independent exploration of self-driving technology through comma.ai, his post at Tesla thereafter succeeded by Andrej Karpathy.

Primary sourcesPublic reporting on Hotz’s iPhone jailbreak (2007)The official comma.ai project page

Key stories

A Partnership That Ended a Few Months After It Began

Not long after joining Tesla, Hotz had a clear disagreement with Musk over the development path and team management of the self-driving system, and the two’s cooperation lasted only a few months before ending, Hotz thereafter refocusing on his own comma.ai project to continue exploring the realization path of low-cost self-driving in a more independent, open-source way, and his former technical-lead post at Tesla was thereafter succeeded by Andrej Karpathy.

Relationships

Nemesis

🚀Elon Musk 🚗Andrej Karpathy

Echoes today

Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.

The "hacker spirit" enters the field of self-drivingHotz’s path from teenage hacker to self-driving entrepreneur was seen by the media as a distinctive case of bringing the open-source, decentralized spirit of hacker culture into this technical field usually dominated by big companies.

Appears in

AlphaGo, the Transformer, and the Race to ScaleThe Self-Driving Vision Dispute

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