George Hotz
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George Francis Hotz (born October 2, 1989), known online as "geohot," is an American software engineer, security researcher, and entrepreneur. He first became widely known as a teenager for high profile security exploits: in 2007 he was the first person to carrier unlock Apple's original iPhone, and between 2009 and 2011 he reverse engineered Sony's PlayStation 3, which led to a closely watched lawsuit. Hotz later turned to artificial intelligence and founded two companies: comma.ai, which develops the open source openpilot driver assistance system, and the tiny corp, which builds tinygrad, a minimalist deep learning framework, together with the tinybox computer.[1]
Hotz grew up in Glen Rock, New Jersey, and attended the Academy for Engineering and Design Technology, part of the Bergen County Academies magnet school in Hackensack. As a teenager he was a repeat finalist at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, where his projects centered on three dimensional imaging and a homemade augmented reality display.[1]
In August 2007, at the age of 17, Hotz became the first person publicly reported to remove the SIM lock on Apple's original iPhone, freeing the device from its exclusive carrier, AT&T. The unlock combined a hardware modification, which required soldering, with custom software, and Hotz documented the process online. He later traded the unlocked phone to Terry Daidone, a founder of the repair firm CertiCell, in exchange for a Nissan 350Z sports car and three additional iPhones. Over the following two years he released a series of software jailbreaking tools, including purplera1n and blackra1n in 2009, before announcing in July 2010 that he was stepping away from iPhone jailbreaking.[1]
In late 2009 Hotz turned to Sony's PlayStation 3, a console that had long resisted hacking. In January 2010 he announced that he had obtained read and write access to the machine's system memory along with hypervisor level access, and he published details of the exploit. Sony responded that April by removing the console's "OtherOS" feature, which had let owners install Linux, a decision that angered many users.[1]
The conflict escalated in early 2011. Drawing on work by the hacking group fail0verflow, which showed that Sony had implemented its cryptography insecurely, Hotz published the PlayStation 3's root signing keys on January 2, 2011, opening the door for unsigned code to run on the console. On January 11, 2011, Sony Computer Entertainment America sued him in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, seeking a restraining order. The case became a cause celebre for digital rights advocates, and the hacktivist collective Anonymous publicly rallied to his defense. In April 2011 the two sides settled out of court, with Hotz agreeing to a permanent injunction barring him from ever again hacking Sony products. He maintained that he had never intended to enable piracy.[1]
Following his hacking fame, Hotz held a series of short stints at well known technology companies. He worked as a software engineer at Facebook from May 2011 to January 2012. In 2013 he completed a brief avionics internship at SpaceX. On July 16, 2014, he joined Google as part of its newly formed Project Zero security team, where he built Qira, a tool for the dynamic analysis of application binaries. He briefly attended both the Rochester Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon University but did not complete a degree.[1]
In early 2015 Hotz spent roughly six months, from January to July, as a researcher at Vicarious, an artificial intelligence startup. The work deepened his interest in neural networks and machine learning, and it set the stage for the venture that would define the next decade of his career.[1]
According to a December 2015 Bloomberg Businessweek profile, a mutual acquaintance introduced Hotz to Elon Musk in 2015, and the two met at Tesla's factory in Fremont, California, to discuss a deal in which Hotz would build a self driving system to rival the technology Tesla licensed from Mobileye. The arrangement reportedly fell apart when Musk altered the terms at the last minute, turning a contract with fixed milestones into an option to buy if he was satisfied with the result. Hotz refused and resolved to build the system himself.[2]
He founded comma.ai in September 2015 and engineered a self driving retrofit into a 2016 Acura ILX, using cameras, radar, and a neural network trained on real world driving data rather than the high definition maps and lidar favored by rivals such as Waymo. The Bloomberg profile, titled "The First Person to Hack the iPhone Built a Self-Driving Car," brought the project wide attention, and Hotz publicly needled Tesla over its Autopilot system. His thesis was that a cheap, camera based aftermarket device, improved through machine learning from fleet data, could deliver capable driver assistance without the cost of a purpose built autonomous vehicle.[2][3]
In 2016 comma.ai planned to sell an aftermarket self driving device called the comma one. In October 2016 the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration sent the company a letter requesting information about the product's compliance with Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards. Rather than engage the regulator, Hotz canceled the product, writing on Twitter, "Would much rather spend my life building amazing tech than dealing with regulators and lawyers. It isn't worth it."[1] The following month, in November 2016, the company pivoted to an open source model, releasing its driving software, openpilot, for free on GitHub while selling the hardware needed to run it.[1]
The product line evolved through the comma two (2020), the comma three (2021), and the comma 3X, a windshield mounted unit that plugs into a supported car and runs openpilot. By the mid 2020s openpilot supported more than 300 vehicle models, and the company reported that its users had collectively driven well over 100 million miles with the system engaged. In a 2020 Consumer Reports evaluation of active driving assistance systems, openpilot rated highly, placing above offerings such as Tesla's Autopilot and General Motors' Super Cruise. Unusually for an autonomous driving company, comma.ai sells a physical product to paying customers and has described itself as profitable.[1][4]
Hotz stepped down as chief executive of comma.ai in September 2018, handing the role to Riccardo Biasini, a former Tesla engineer, while staying on to lead engineering and research. In November 2022 he stepped back from day to day leadership to focus on a new venture, remaining on the company's board.[1][5]
Hotz founded the tiny corp on November 5, 2022. The company's products are built around tinygrad, a deep learning framework he had been developing as a personal project. Hotz positioned tinygrad as a middle ground between the simplicity of Andrej Karpathy's teaching framework micrograd and the full functionality of PyTorch. It uses lazy evaluation and aggressive operation fusion, and it is deliberately built on a small set of low level operations so that supporting a new hardware accelerator requires implementing only that handful of primitives. The framework already powers openpilot's driving model on the comma three's Qualcomm Snapdragon GPU.[1][6]
The tiny corp's stated mission is to "commoditize the petaflop" and to break the dominance that NVIDIA and its CUDA software hold over machine learning, by making alternative chips, especially those from AMD, genuinely usable for training and inference. On May 24, 2023, Hotz announced that the company had raised 5.1 million dollars. Its flagship hardware is the tinybox, a prebuilt machine learning workstation sold in several configurations, including a "red" box built around six AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPUs at about 15,000 dollars, a "green" box built around NVIDIA consumer cards, and a higher end tinybox pro.[6][7]
Through 2025 Hotz pushed deeper into the AMD ecosystem. In a March 2025 post titled "AMD YOLO," he announced that AMD had shipped the company two of its flagship MI300X data center accelerators, and the tiny corp set out to write its own drivers and runtime so that tinygrad could drive AMD hardware without relying on AMD's own ROCm software stack. By 2025 the effort was reported to be nearing a "completely sovereign" compute stack for AMD GPUs, and an AMD software executive publicly endorsed the collaboration. Hotz continues to serve as the company's chief executive.[7][8]
In November 2022, shortly after Elon Musk acquired Twitter, Hotz signed on for a 12 week internship, taking on tasks that included improving the platform's search and a login prompt shown to logged out users. He resigned on December 20, 2022, after roughly five weeks, writing "Resigned from Twitter today" and explaining that he did not think he could make a real impact there.[9]
Hotz is an outspoken commentator on artificial intelligence. On Lex Fridman's podcast in 2023 he argued that scaling language models on cross entropy loss alone will not produce artificial general intelligence, and that reinforcement learning in rich environments would be required. He is skeptical of centralized AI safety efforts, contending that concentrating control of powerful models is more dangerous than distributing it, and he favors open, widely available AI. He is known for a brash, build in public style, including frequent live coding streams.[10]
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 2007 | First person to carrier unlock the original iPhone, at age 17 |
| 2009 to 2011 | Reverse engineers the PlayStation 3; publishes its signing keys |
| 2011 | Sony lawsuit settled with a permanent injunction |
| 2011 to 2012 | Software engineer at Facebook |
| 2013 | Avionics intern at SpaceX |
| 2014 | Joins Google Project Zero |
| 2015 | Researcher at Vicarious; founds comma.ai |
| 2016 | Cancels the comma one after an NHTSA inquiry; open sources openpilot |
| 2018 | Steps down as comma.ai CEO |
| Nov 2022 | Founds the tiny corp; brief Twitter internship |
| 2023 | The tiny corp raises 5.1 million dollars for tinygrad |
| 2025 | "AMD YOLO": builds a sovereign AMD compute stack in tinygrad |