George Hotz

In August 2007 the 17-year-old from Glen Rock, New Jersey, announced that he had unlocked an iPhone to work on T-MobileT-MobileT-Mobile (T-Mobile US, Inc.) is one of the major U.S. wireless carriers, headquartered in Bellevue, Washington, and Overland Park, Kansas, and controlled by Deutsche Telekom. Its predecessor was VoiceStream Wireless, founded in 1994; it listed on Nasdaq after combining with MetroPCS in 2013 and merged with Sprint in 2020.Open the full entry’s network; the process required soldering and software skills, and he worked with four online collaborators, two of them in Russia, posting the details on his blog.⁠[1]

In January 2010 he said that after five weeks of work he had accessed the PlayStation 3’s root key and could “do whatever I want with the system,” and planned to publish how he did it once he had ironed out the kinks.⁠[2]

On January 11, 2011, Sony Computer Entertainment America sued him, members of the fail0verflow team and others, seeking a temporary restraining order and alleging that distributing PS3 root keys and jailbreak tools violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).⁠[3]

In April 2011 the two sides settled with no monetary terms disclosed; he said he had not intended to facilitate piracy, while Sony said it sued to protect its intellectual property and its consumers.⁠[4]

One term required him to remove all materials about hacking the PS3 from his personal site and elsewhere.⁠[5]

In March 2014, at the Pwn2Own contest at the CanSecWest conference in Vancouver, he took down FirefoxFirefoxFirefox is an open-source web browser developed by Mozilla. It began as Phoenix in 2002 and released version 1.0 in 2004.Open the full entry through an out-of-bounds read/write vulnerability and won $50,000.⁠[6]

When Google unveiled its vulnerability-hunting team Project Zero in July 2014, he was interning on the team.⁠[7]

He briefly attended the Rochester Institute of Technology and later left Carnegie Mellon UniversityCarnegie Mellon UniversityCarnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It grew out of the Carnegie Technical Schools, founded with funding from Andrew Carnegie in 1900, which were renamed the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1912 and took the present name after merging with the Mellon Institute in 1967. The university is known for computer science, robotics, engineering, and the arts, and has campuses in Qatar, Silicon Valley, and Rwanda. As of September 2025, it enrolled 16,582 students. Its current president is Farnam Jahanian. On September 30, 2026, the university announced a $3 billion gift from Ken Griffin and plans to build a new campus in Miami.Open the full entry after two semesters; he worked four months at SpaceXSpaceXSpaceX is a company founded by Elon Musk in 2002 whose businesses include space transportation, Starlink satellite communications and artificial intelligence. It went public in 2026 under the ticker SPCX.Open the full entry and eight months at Facebook. In 2015, at 26, he spent about a month fitting a 2016 Acura ILX with lidar, cameras and a computer to build a self-driving system, and started comma.ai.⁠[8]

In September 2016 he unveiled the Comma One driver-assistance device at TechCrunch Disrupt SF; in October the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) issued a special order with 15 questions to confirm its compliance, and comma.ai cancelled the product, with him saying a life dealing with regulators and lawyers “isn’t worth it.”⁠[9]

On November 30, 2016, comma.ai open-sourced its openpilot driver-assistance software and its Neo hardware, initially supporting only two models, the 2016 Acura ILX and Honda Civic Touring.⁠[10]

On August 5, 2019, he first appeared on the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast in an episode titled “Comma.ai, OpenPilot, and Autonomous Vehicles.”⁠[11]

In October 2020 he started the deep learning framework tinygrad as a toy project to learn about neural networks; it later came to run the model in openpilot.⁠[12]

In October 2020 he appeared on episode 132, discussing the simulation hypothesis, an Ethereum startup story, cryptocurrency, the Comma two, Tesla versus comma.ai, driver monitoring, GPT-3 and AGI.⁠[13]

On October 29, 2022, he announced in a blog post that he was taking time away from comma.ai, remaining its sole board member and president; comma.ai then sold a $1,999 devkit compatible with more than 200 vehicles and had raised $8.1 million in two rounds from a16zAndreessen HorowitzAndreessen Horowitz (a16z) is a venture capital firm founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. It invests from the seed stage through the growth stage and provides operational support to its portfolio companies.Open the full entry and $10 million from individuals. He turned to Tiny Corporation, aiming to build a machine learning framework faster and simpler than PyTorch.⁠[14]

In November 2022 he took a 12-week internship at Twitter to fix problems including search; on December 20 he announced his resignation on Twitter, saying he did not think he could make any real impact and writing, “Back to coding!”⁠[15]

On May 24, 2023, he announced that his new company, tiny corp, had raised $5.1 million, with the near-term goal of getting AMDAMDAMD (Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.) is a publicly traded U.S. semiconductor company founded in 1969 and headquartered in Santa Clara, California; its stock trades on Nasdaq under the ticker AMD. The company develops CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, adaptive systems-on-chip and related software, mainly for the data center, personal computer, gaming and embedded markets; its product brands include Ryzen, EPYC, Radeon and Instinct.Open the full entry chips onto the MLPerf benchmark list using its own framework, tinygrad.⁠[16]

In his blog post he described tiny corp as a computer company whose goal is “to commoditize the petaflop.”⁠[12]

In June 2023 he appeared on episode 387, discussing tiny corp, NVIDIANVIDIANVIDIA is an American semiconductor and computing technology company that provides graphics processing units, artificial intelligence infrastructure, networking interconnects, and computing software, and is listed on Nasdaq under the ticker NVDA.Open the full entry versus AMD, the tinybox, self-driving, AI safety, working at Twitter and Andrej KarpathyAndrej KarpathyAndrej Karpathy is an AI researcher and educator, one of the founding members of OpenAI, who served as Tesla’s Director of AI and led the Autopilot computer vision team from 2017 to 2022, founded the AI education company Eureka Labs in 2024, and joined Anthropic in 2026 to work on pre-training research; at Stanford he designed and taught the university’s first deep learning course, CS231n, and he coined the term “vibe coding.”Open the full entry.⁠[17]

As of October 2026 comma.ai’s website sells the comma four for $999, saying it works with more than 350 models across 27 brands and is in use in more than 30,000 cars.⁠[18]

tiny corp’s website sells the tinybox, a made-to-order computer for deep learning.⁠[19]

Personal website: Public link: https://geohot.github.io/blog/ (opens in a new window)⁠[20]

X: Public account: https://x.com/realgeorgehotz (opens in a new window)⁠[20]

comma.ai: Official website: https://comma.ai/ (opens in a new window)⁠[18]

tiny corp: Official website: https://tinygrad.org/ (opens in a new window)⁠[19]