GeoHot is building a self-driving car to take on Tesla - iPhoneHeat

GeoHot is building a self-driving car to take on Tesla

George Hotz, better known as “Geohot“, is the father of carrier-unlocking iPhone which allowed users to use their iPhone with other unofficial carriers as well. He’s also one of the pioneers of early iPhone jailbreaking scene. After a long absence from iOS jailbreaking and unlocking scene, he appeared on the scene again but with a PlayStation jailbreak. But didn’t took his reverse engineering efforts lightly and GeoHot had to face legal actions from Sony but later he settled with the company. Once again, the same GeoHot has come up with an idea of building a self-driving car of his own, according to Bloomberg Businessweek.

George Hots Bloomberg

Similar to what he did to the iPhones, and Playstation, he has now done the same to an ordinary 2016 Acura ILX sedan. GeoHot has managed to turn his Acura into a self-driving car and did achieve all that by working in his garage. He attached a 21.5-icnh display, a joystick, mounted a camera near the rearview mirror and put a laser-based radar on the roof to turn his car into a self-driving vehicle.

We’re on the brink of another industrial revolution now. The entire Internet at the moment has about 10 brains’ worth of computing power, but that won’t always be the case.

He has written his own software that runs on a Linux-based machine to handle the cameras and sensors. He claims his software to be a self-teaching artificial intelligence that uses data from the vehicle and driver to learn from their choices. His self-driving vehicle is not depending on a software which comes with a preprogrammed rules for driving, it learns from the drivers and training miles.

geohot self-driving car

Interestingly enough, his achievement is said to have impressed Elon Musk, the founder, and co-owner of Tesla Motors, so much that he offered Hotz to work for him on homegrown Autopilot software along with a multimillion-dollar bonus, but he declined. GeoHot claims, in a coming few months, he will have a video of his self-driving car outperforming a Tesla across Golden Gate Bridge.

I’m happy to work out a multimillion-dollar bonus with a longer time horizon that pays out as soon as we discontinue Mobileye. I’m a big Elon fan, but I wish he didn’t jerk me around for three months,” he says. “He can buy the technology for double.

Currently, GeoHot is running his own company called comma.ai and is trying to best Mobileye – a major supplier of driving assistance systems to most of the big names including Tesla. Hotz is building his own $1000 kit using off-the-shelf components consisting of six cameras that would be placed around the car and a smart control software. He’s planning on selling the kit directly to consumers who would buy customized vehicles at a showroom run by Hotz.

The truth is that work as we know it in its modern form has not been around that long, and I kind of want to use AI to abolish it. I want to take everyone’s jobs. Most people would be happy with that, especially the ones who don’t like their jobs.

Let’s free them of mental tedium and push that to machines. In the next 10 years, you’ll see a big segment of the human labor force fall away. In 25 years, AI will be able to do almost everything a human can do. The last people with jobs will be AI programmers.

GeoHot is known as the first person to carrier unlock the very first iPhone. He also released popular jailbreak tools such as Limera1n and Blackra1n.
via [Bloomberg]

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