Great piece at Bloomberg. Promising, exciting. Even surprising. George Hotz -a.k.a. ‘geohot’- showed his genius when he was only 17 years old and he hacked the iPhone. The gave another testament of his technical prowess three years later, when he hacked the PS3 and put Sony in big problems.
And know, at 26, he’s making an even bigger bet: develop an autonomous car by himself. He thinks he can beat Tesla autopilot -the video shows that the system is pretty promising (still a “Level 3” autonomy out of four levels)- by himself, and that could lead to a development that could even rival the one by Google, which is a full autonomous car.
His new startup, comma.ai is clear in his simple, unique message: “ghostriding for the masses“. There’s still no signs on how the software will be published, but Hotz has always shared his work with everyone for free, so excluding hardware costs for the system -around $1000 according to the Bloomberg article-, this could change this segment forever.
An Open Source autonomous car is possible, and there’s something revealing here. Elon Musk, whom big businesses are usually afraid of, is afraid himself. Or at least, it seems so in his defensive message. Interesting.
