George Hotz — Founder of comma.ai, maker of openpilot; famous for being the first to unlock the iPhone and an outspoken hacker and AI engineer.
The gist
George Hotz joins Lex Fridman to discuss his journey from hardware hacking the iPhone to founding comma.ai, an open-source vehicle automation company. He argues that good lane-keeping is the real consumer value in self-driving, that level 4 is not a real thing, and that the only way to exceed human driving performance is end-to-end learning rather than hand-coded perception-and-planning stacks. He is proud to ship a level-2 system with a rigorous safety model and full driver monitoring, and is sharply critical of lidar, V2V/V2I as safety dependencies, and over-promised robo-taxi timelines. The conversation ranges into simulation, the static/dynamic/counterfactual breakdown of driving, business models like insurance, and finally philosophy on the singularity, reward functions, and merging with AI.
Big reveals
- Hotz describes Elon Musk's contract offer: $12 million to match Mobileye performance, losing $1M per month of delay.
- Claims comma.ai has kept pace with Tesla and is roughly one to two years behind Tesla on reaching level five.
- States openpilot will not be considered 1.0 until it has 100% uncheatable driver monitoring.
- Argues end-to-end learning is the only way to exceed human driving performance, citing AlphaGo as proof.
- Reveals comma's long-term plan to become a car insurance company using its driving-safety data.
- Breaks driving into three problems: static (solved by mapping/localization), dynamic, and counterfactual.
- Reveals comma has ~700 daily and ~1000 weekly active users making tens of thousands of consequence-free mistakes weekly used as learning signal.
- Shares comma's finances: burn rate ~$200k/month, revenue ~$100k/month from selling products to consumers.
Things worth remembering
- The first iPhone hack was physical hardware work: opening it up and pulling an address line high.
- Hotz built his timeless debugger kira four times before it became usable, finishing during a 2014 Google internship.
- He worked at Google's Project Zero for five months in 2015, its offensive security team that drops zero-days after a 90-day fix deadline.
- Modern iPhone jailbreaks now require around nine chained exploits instead of one.
- openpilot hardware is a Snapdragon 820 phone with an IMX 298 camera in a plastic case, paired with a CAN transceiver called panda.
- comma supports 45 makes of cars, mostly Hondas and Toyotas; the 2020 Corolla is called the best car for openpilot.
- Hotz argues GM's $1B Cruise acquisition was essentially an insurance policy against Waymo.
- He buys a 'human's worth of compute' (~one TPU v3 pod, ~100 petaflops) for about a million dollars.
- Defines the singularity as the point when most flops in the world are silicon rather than biological.
- Cites Schmidhuber's theory that the ideal agent goal is to maximize the derivative of compression of the past.