24 ms·

I’m taking some time away from Comma

381 points by ra7 4y ago

rjb7731 4y ago
I wish him the best, I find his streams incredibly useful and they motivate me to be better at solving problems and coding. Hopefully he still does work on AGI and makes tinygrad even cooler.
chadoverfl0w 4y ago
I wonder which fields he'll go into next. I use him as my compass on what fields I should start learning next. I sometimes put his streams in the background to listen to as whatever he works on, it seems to be the next field in tech to boom fast.
epgui 4y ago
His writing is even more self aggrandizing than Stephen Wolfram’s!
- awestroke 4y ago
  That's no easy feat
- pramsey 4y ago
  Nice to know, in this dark age, there are still true Heroes walking among us.
  - aliqot 4y ago
    When it's your actual track record it's not bragging. It's just facts. edit: apparently this is a hot take to some, but no real substantive refuting of what's being said- only appeals to greater authority. "Well so and so was smarter"
    - prvit 4y ago
      Geohots actual track record isn’t that impressive though, he’s just one exploit dev with an OK portfolio. >edit: apparently this is a hot take to some, but no real substantive refuting of what's being said- only appeals to greater authority. "Well so and so was smarter" Do you happen to have substantive evidence to back up the original claim?
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - capableweb 4y ago
        It's always fun to see anonymous users saying someone else isn't "that impressive though". He managed to breach the security of three different platforms (iOS, Android and PlayStation) across multiple devices, which feels a lot like more than most security researchers manage to do in their lifetime, while geohot is about 35 by now. Or, you have some good examples that the average security researcher have a better track record than that?
        dekhn 4y ago
        I knew a few security people at Google and frankly, geohot isn't even in their class. He's a smart guy. Did some stuff. isn't particularly special or significantly better than a typical engineer in my experience. Mainly he seems to jump deep into things he doesn't know much about (I'm talking about post-security) and say a bunch of irresponsible things then fail to deliver a complete product, entirely predictably. He's the sort of person you want to ensconce in a safe place far from others, with the freedom to experiment, to come up with disruptive ideas to influence others.
        capableweb 4y ago
        > I knew a few security people at Google and frankly, geohot isn't even in their class Who, exactly, are you talking about here? And what are their track record?
        4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
awestroke 4y ago
Hotz has always come across as very arrogant to me. Claims everyone else is doing things the wrong way, claims he can do it himself in 24h, then never delivers on his words.
- rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 4y ago
  I just want to point out that Hotz delivered when he was doing hacking related work. He's very talented, I don't want people to think he's a scam artist.
  - postalrat 4y ago
    He's talented and arrogant and promises more than he can deliver.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - mwint 4y ago
      So what? Lately it seems like there are so many accusations of over-promising, but no one explains why this is harmful. Misleading investors? Doesn’t HN hate big money anyway? In so many cases it seems like someone promises 5x and delivers 3x… I’ll take it, over 0. Then I’ll remember and apply an adjustment factor to future promises.
- diydsp 4y ago
  > never delivers on his words. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hotz#Security_research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hotz#Security_research
- rattlesnakedave 4y ago
  I agree he does come off as arrogant at times. There are plenty of times when he's right, though. Those times are pretty fun to read about: https://twitter.com/jinglejamop/status/1310718738417811459 https://twitter.com/jinglejamop/status/1310718738417811459
Rahul_Ligma 4y ago
Hotz - long time reader here. Good luck with Tiny Corporation. Don’t stop writing these blog posts they are fantastic. Thank you @ra7 for posting this.
- fizwhiz 4y ago
  OT: Sorry to hear what happened to you at Twitter (:
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
jeffbee 4y ago
There is no room for innovators in the autonomous driving game. All the startups predicated on fast innovation will be shaken out. Most already have been. Autonomous driving is about delivering quality software. If you're not a software company with a solid platform, you aren't in the game. As this blog post illustrates, the whole comma.ai thing was pitched based on vibes anyway. There never was a path to viability.
- panick21_ 4y ago
  What definition of 'viability' are you using. As in the company is not viable?
- humble_dude_1 4y ago
  > the whole comma.ai thing was pitched based on vibes anyway How else do you convince people to take risks? With hard evidence of traction? Then what the fuck do you need money for?
- newaccount2021 4y ago
  agree in a sense - autonomy could take a generation to deliver, and it isn't clear how a small "traditional" startup can really participate and everything in tech attracts wannabes and grifters making a cashgrab
jkeddo 4y ago
Damn this is very disappointing :/
p0wn 4y ago
One of my favorite tech articles of all time involved this guy. He was showing off the self driving capabilities of his framework and took a reporter out on a drive. Everything went well and while they were wrapping up the interview the reporter said "Well I bet you're just driving around all the time hands free, it must be amazing" and Hotz says "Oh well I just got it working this morning". Classic. I love it. My kind of engineer.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
  That kind of attitude is great for editor or compiler or game development. It is absolutely the wrong attitude for self-driving cars or anything that is safety critical.
  - 1980phipsi 4y ago
    To be fair, he was recently in the news saying self-driving cars are a scam. https://cleantechnica.com/2022/10/09/george-hotz-autonomous-cars-are-a-scam-connected-cars-may-be-the-new-thing/ https://cleantechnica.com/2022/10/09/george-hotz-autonomous-...
    - panick21_ 4y ago
      Self driving car companies, not cars are the scam. And he has been saying the same thing for years.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - jeffbee 4y ago
      "I am a charlatan and therefore this whole industry is a scam" does not have great logic to it.
    - collegeburner 4y ago
      "I couldn't get this working so nobody else can either". Classic gifted kid response to failure tbh.
monktastic1 4y ago
Can't say I care much about what "George Hotz" is doing, but this line struck me as particularly silly: > And even if you are an atheist, you probably still accept the bible is the closest thing we have to a human origin story. I can't imagine why he believes so. Apart from the modern materialist origin story, what about all the mythical ones from other cultures? Of all of them, this is my favorite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckiNNgfMKcQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckiNNgfMKcQ
- rsgalloway 4y ago
  “we are bytes in God’s computer” from his Lex Fridman interview.
  - gjvc 4y ago
  - gnramires 4y ago
    People should get to know Spizona's ideas. Note: I support all peaceful religions. Spinoza's ideas are close enough to this notion: that God is also Nature; for Spizona, we're not bytes in God's computer, we're literally part of God's (infinite) mind -- Nature itself. This is a really beautiful interpretation of Christianity, and absolutely compatible with science and all modern knowledge. God is hence all knowing, and immortal; God loves all existences (which are all themselves pieces of God). I think if religions are to survive healthily (and contribute to everyone's lives), they should become compatible with science and truth. The greatest implication is that we are responsible for good ourselves, and if heaven exists, something like us (or our descendants, or other beings entirely) it's up to us to build it (which I couldn't agree more). We should start now!
    - vasco 4y ago
      So call it Nature, why do you need a separate theological construction to realize all of nature is part of the universe which all came from the same start in the big bang and we should all respect each other? Is there really a need for anything else?
eddof13 4y ago
I must say props for the BAP reference
KVFinn 4y ago
"I'm taking some time away from comma." means leaving the company entirely? Not stepping away from leadership, or taking a break? The body text does have the vibe of totally leaving the company. But it's not clearly stated. I'm a little sad overall, I was never really impressed by George until he did Comma and started building real things. I was mildly hopeful about the Comma bodies before seeing this. Tinygrad/tinycude seem cool. Anything to squeeze more memory out of these GPUs.
techwiz137 4y ago
To me it seems like after cracking the PS3 and working for sony is where he went downhill. He could never top that.
mach1ne 4y ago
I hope his shine hasn't burned out yet. People seem to do great things in their 20s, and then at best ride the wave they set in motion. Actually creating a wonder from zero after you've clocked 30 is very rare.
- rblatz 4y ago
  This isn't a true stereotype. The average unicorn founder is aged 34. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-21/what-s-the-average-age-of-a-startup-founder-it-s-34-study-says https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-21/what-s-th...
  - harryvederci 4y ago
    This is correct, I'm under 34 and I haven't founded my unicorn yet.
  - bookofjoe 4y ago
    I'm 74 so I guess it's GAME OVER, huh? Oh well
    - bookofjoe 4y ago
      Speaking of which, who is the oldest person on HN? Can't be me... can it?
      - atdrummond 4y ago
        There are definitely some Bell Labs/Xerox/IBM old heads in their 70s and 80s here.
      - jkeddo 4y ago
        I think there are some guys from ARPAnet days here.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- 4y ago
htk 4y ago
Hotz is an amazing MacGyver of Code, but unfortunately (for his own expectations) seems to be limited to only that.
- dmix 4y ago
  He organized and inpired a team and delivered a product, the product is still in development and their fate is still to be seen. Nothing wrong with accepting you're a very early stage CTO type of person and to accept the situation isn't the right one for you.
xiphias2 4y ago
As long as he keeps on with the tinygrad Twitch streems I don't care. I got far more value of him doing live programming than $5/month.
- Havoc 4y ago
  Apparently there is an archive of it on yt https://www.youtube.com/c/georgehotzarchive/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/georgehotzarchive/videos
nynx 4y ago
It strikes me as surprising that George Hotz is religious. Very few people I’ve met with similar personalities are.
- newbieuser 4y ago
  why is it surprising?
  - rcpt 4y ago
    He explained in his second sentence
  - alarmingfox 4y ago
    I believe the OP answered that in their second sentence. > Very few people I’ve met with similar personalities are.
- thepasswordis 4y ago
  I've seen this change dramatically in the last few years. The people I knew 10 years ago who were the sortof frighteningly brilliant hackers have almost all become religious (mostly traditional Catholics). I'm not saying this is an objective truth, just that this has been my experience.
  - geerlingguy 4y ago
    I think part of that (specifically Catholic) stems from the fact that it's one of the few religions that is compatible with a scientific understanding of the world, where science is seen as a worthwhile study of creation, and not something that's dangerous and evil (like many modern fundamentalist groups seem to think). The danger IMO comes when people tie their religious belief too strongly to political movements, or think that just because there is doctrine around a certain aspect of human culture/life, there is no questioning it or investigating it further. A healthy skepticism (especially over one's own beliefs) is central to a good life IMO.
    - 4y ago
generationP 4y ago
George Hotz is my canary for the question "is there still adventure to be found in computing". I hope he finds some, because if he can't, then there is probably none.
- thejackgoode 4y ago
  That’s one huge projected canary
- deltree7 4y ago
  I'm a fan of George Hotz. But don't be a cult
  - serf 4y ago
    Excited to see what Hotz gets into next. An ounce of humility might do him some good, but i'd be hesitant to recommend it to someone like that and ruin his whole edge -- similar to Musk, I think that attitude is huge with regards to their personal effectiveness. now a short story that your cult comment conjured in my head: the year is 2122. the Muskalonian robotic death squad approaches the last cave hold-out of Hotzite believers.. thankfully the killer robots pass by peacefully, blind to the possible engagement because the squad lacks radar and lidar, and the cave is dark.
    - lawrenceyan 4y ago
      You should get into sci-fi. I'd read this.
  - generationP 4y ago
    You're reading my post too optimistically. I am far from convinced that computing is a good volcano to leap into these days. The last innovations that have made me wow were the Wikipedia (2001), python (1991-) and mid-2000s progress in game engines. Over the last 15 years, all the changes have been rather incremental (languages, security, some OSs, game engines again) or disappointing (cryptocurrencies, social networks), with the exception of ML. Now, ML is a fresh breeze but it is lacking the "garage-ability" that computing has been famous for; good luck competing with the bigshots on that field. And there is still a great potential for disappointment as it is unclear how well it scales beyond the type of problems that have lots of data to train on or allow for automatic reward (RL).
aliqot 4y ago
Goerge doesn't owe anybody anything. The kid's following his whims. What's wrong with that? I'd rather this than some long and drawn out stagnation of comma.
gekoxyz 4y ago
Big respect for this decision. If he feels like it's all planned out and only remains to see if it works or not (it's all about improving the current models and not about big changes in the codebase) I think it's good for him to focus on whatever he feels like, tiny corporation or whatever it will be.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
agentultra 4y ago
I used to like watching his streams but he seems to have become somewhat unhinged in recent years. Perhaps he is believing too much about what people have said about him. The arrogance and aggrandizement was the turn-off for me. Well that and his belief, while at comma, that how fast you can code is the most important metric when assessing software engineers. Competition programming is fun to watch but a poor indicator of maturity or success. In many systems it doesn't matter how fast you arrive at an answer. Increasingly it becomes important to arrive at something close to the right answer and to be able to show your work and prove to others why it sufficient and suitable. Still good for a hot take though. I hope time off will help him cool down a bit. Programming all night in a do-or-die mode is fun and all until you get a bit older. For many people who lived this life they realize only too late that they didn't spend enough time making friends and building a community around themselves of genuine relationships. Update: I should also say that despite the weird god stuff and what-not; a decision to leave a company because it has changed and you're no longer a good fit is a HUGE decision and one that is often not made by founders. Massive props for that.
- Fatnino 4y ago
  "recent years"? This guy has always been like this, going all the way back to ios hacking days or even wii hacking days.
  - agentultra 4y ago
    A certain amount of arrogance is cheeky and endearing. Then there's the kind where the talented musician in the band announces their departure and solo album. And starts talking about finding God and becoming a modern day Prometheus. I can't put my finger on when the transition happened but it was somewhere just before the Lex interview for me.
    - trompetenaccoun 4y ago
      He doesn't come off as particularly arrogant to me, more like a straightforward and direct type. I've yet to meet someone who's good at what they do who isn't convinced of themselves, so that's a given. A philosopher might argue you need this sort of mindset to be successful in the first place. However knowing that you're better at something than most other people doesn't equal arrogance when it's true. There are also a lot of arrogant people who know how to put on an act in public.
andrewmcwatters 4y ago
George’s insights on self-driving cars remind me of when you get the rare exceptional engineer in your company who knows 100% what he or she is talking about down to the exact implementation level and all of the alternatives, and leadership totally ignores them because they foolhardily believe this kid can’t possibly be right—without asking engineering questions to test to see if they’re right about the engineer being wrong or having not considered something. Except George seems to have been right to the tune of others spending billions of dollars while this dude hacked on free and open source software. His biggest bootstrap expenses were probably commodity hardware, before dealing with business purchase orders. I find that hilarious and extremely gratifying.
- ra7 4y ago
  His insights on self driving cars are total fluff once you realize he was only working on problems several orders of magnitude smaller in scope than the ones spending billions are attempting to solve. Autonomous driving is more than just making lane-keep on highways work with a camera mounted to the windshield and requires more than just "hacking". His insights do indicate one thing: that he doesn't understand the rigor required to engineer safety-critical systems.
  - andrewmcwatters 4y ago
    I mean you can say that all you want, but the proof of the self-driving pudding is in the driving, and SAE Level 2 is the most practical self-driving we are ever going to get. I don't think there's anything wrong with trying to refine that approach as much as openpilot did, and honestly if there was fruit in SAE Level 3 and above, I feel like we would have seen it by now, but we haven't. I have no idea what you mean by "problems several orders of magnitude." Driving is driving. Your hardware and software can do it, or it can't. What do billions of dollars have to do with anything? Should people remind you Meta spent billions of dollars on a less popular Second Life? How would you explain to shareholders that your solution can't compete with openpilot?
    - mwint 4y ago
shubhamjain 4y ago
> It’s well within comma’s reach to become a 100M+ revenue consumer electronics company (without raising again!), but I don’t think I’m capable of running a company like that. I’ve always heard it takes different people at different company sizes. Why not talk about the current numbers before making such a claim? Who's using Comma.ai? How many people are paying for it? $100M+ is a big deal for a consumer electronics company. George Hotz is no doubt a smart person, but very few "gifted" engineers are equally successful being business people as well. Most of them end deluding themselves severly in some way, which might be evident in the latter part of the blog post.
- terafo 4y ago
  $5.57M last year, probably more this year considering how hard it was to get chips last year.
lovehashbrowns 4y ago
Kinda surprising that he's stepping away from Comma.ai after they just opened their new office in San Diego. Anyhow, there's a Hotz stream out in the world where he completes a few of those hacking challenge exercises. George is an amazing engineer and I use that stream as a metric for where I want to be in my knowledge and technical ability.
- icpmacdo 4y ago
  A link to that would be awesome if possible
  - lazylion2 4y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFaFmkCEGEs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFaFmkCEGEs https://github.com/geohot/twitchchess https://github.com/geohot/twitchchess https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Hlb8YX2-W8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Hlb8YX2-W8 https://github.com/geohot/twitchslam https://github.com/geohot/twitchslam https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8nhQSp__3s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8nhQSp__3s
  - lovehashbrowns 4y ago
    Should be this one: https://youtu.be/Sx7JszqkL-w https://youtu.be/Sx7JszqkL-w
Dave3of5 4y ago
So you can buy this thing off the internet install it yourself and let it drive your car around for you. How legal would that be if it crashed my car or ran someone over? My mind is blown here. Obviously it only works with specific cars that can turn the wheel for you so my 2015 ford focus is impossible but I mean wtf.
- terafo 4y ago
  They are sold as devkits any you need to install software on them on your own. And, IIRC, their software is meant to be used as drive-assist and doesn't work if user does not look at the road.
- capableweb 4y ago
  > How legal would that be if it crashed my car or ran someone over? Generally it is not legal for you to crash your car into others private property (or public for that matter) or run someone over. Just because you have some electronics connected to your car that you installed yourself, doesn't shift over the liability to someone else. Not sure why your mind is blown here. People are allowed to modify their cars, but not hurt other people in the process.
  - Ptchd 4y ago
    > Just because you have some electronics connected to your car that you installed yourself, doesn't shift over the liability to someone else. probably will eventually...
frankjr 4y ago
The article started off as pretty reasonable but gradually turned into complete nonsense.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
nkingsy 4y ago
Didn’t know this guy was a Christian, but his theology seems muddled to me. No I don’t think non-Christians think the Bible is a useful origin story. No there is no chosen one, and the idea doesn’t come from Christianity (unless he means second coming?), but rather the narrative form (as hotz seems to somewhat understand with the heroes journey mention). I’d suggest some strong psychedelics to crack the ego and take a look at what’s inside.
- ramesh31 4y ago
  >I’d suggest some strong psychedelics to crack the ego and take a look at what’s inside. I'd submit that his use of psychedelics is precisely the issue. There was a really odd "/r/Im14AndThisIsDeep" talk he did a few years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESXOAJRdcwQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESXOAJRdcwQ It's been a pretty steady decline into run of the mill schizo "demons and angels" talk from him since then.
  - nkingsy 4y ago
    Interesting. I guess everyone has their own journey. I haven't deluded myself about being the chosen one since I experienced ego death. It has seemed quite clear since then that being alive and alone is strange and temporary. I'll leave it up for posterity but I stand corrected on the psychedelics part.
  - WanderPanda 4y ago
    I found that talk quite interesting/thought provoking (still thinking about some parts years later), is something wrong with me as well?
    - ramesh31 4y ago
      >is something wrong with me as well? Nah. It was just a very naive talk. Highly intelligent people without a philosophical education are prone to going off on these tangents where they independently rediscover ancient concepts through modern analogies in a roundabout half-baked way, and start thinking of themselves as gurus. What a proper study of philosophy teaches you is that you cannot, and will not ever, have a truly novel thought. It's all been said. And if you do happen to have one, it will be the result of an incredible dedicated effort and take a lifetime of work to prove it, building on the work of others. Not an hour long TED talk.
ramesh31 4y ago
I feel a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of Toyota Corollas suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.
baligena 4y ago
what a loser. Just recently, I saw a stream of him denying remote work, life and work balance and refusal to state if compensation was competitive in comma.ai. He cannot grow this company because he will never attract the best people with his stupid and old mentality. Now he leaves the company. This guy is a foolish drugie.
- friend_and_foe 4y ago
  I disagree with you about the guy as a person, I think he's great, but I was considering working there and his requirement that you have to move to SV and work in the office was a deal breaker. The guy seems to understand how our kind of work can be done from anywhere, he seems interested in developing technology to enable self sovereignty, yet it seems he has blinders on on that one issue. I'm sure he has some reasoning for it and I'd love to hear it, I doubt it's convincing but if it's him at the very least it will be novel or interesting (I hope).
  - baligena 4y ago
    he understand so much and interested that he is quitting. Why not stick thru with it?
    - friend_and_foe 4y ago
      He explains it in the article. He's the kind of guy that's good at following through when it's exciting, when it becomes a chore he's more a liability than an asset, so he's handing it over to people who can follow through, he's contributed all he can. Paraphrasing.
stefanrows 4y ago
Apart from his skills, I always found him to be very arrogant. The interviews with Lex Friedman are very good and a good showcase of his true personality.
- throw__2sdfw 4y ago
  He is not arrogant, he is just being honest. He does not display false humility. Just like his programming skills his style of communication is fast paced with no filters. geohotz is so inspiring.
Ninjinka 4y ago
Does this mean no more comma body? That seemed to be George's baby.
HanClinto 4y ago
One of my favorite Dirty Harry quotes: "A man's got to know his limitations." I really appreciate his self-awareness and (dare I say it?) humility in this situation. While other people may be struck by his hubris, I for one really appreciated his humility in this post. I feel like he is acknowledging his own shortcomings, and how while he likes the immaturity of hacking together a racecar, but if Comma is going to go to the next level, then he needs someone who can pilot a boat, and George is not that pilot. I appreciate that awareness, and I appreciate that he has the ability to detach himself and move onwards this way. Kudos to you, George. I appreciate and respect what you do. Thanks for letting us have a glimpse at it -- I personally find it very inspiring and encouraging for me and what I do.
- MetaWhirledPeas 4y ago
  Right? I'm hearing a lot of comments about his ego (and I'm sure he has one) but in this post he's also being refreshingly honest about his own abilities. I think that's a healthy take for anyone: just because you can climb the ladder and make more money doesn't mean you should. I'm sure some people are also triggered by the supernatural turn his writing took there. Who cares? It's interesting, and he's not being a jerk.
  - joshspankit 4y ago
    I have long suspected that you need an ego to lead a company that’s on the frontier. An ego draws boundaries between you and those who seek to take you down and it can also be what pulls you towards a world where you are the one bringing the Big Ideas to life.
  - 4m1rk 4y ago
    Long term I don’t think he would make less money. Though even if he does he'll enjoy what he does and that's all that matters.
- breck 4y ago
  "I'm where I belong, sir."
stephc_int13 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
erulabs 4y ago
An existentialist Christian engineer? There are dozens of us - dozens! > If it turns out we are automata, then the whole struggle is and always was pointless. The empty godless machines will take their rightful place as the rulers of Earth. All existentialists need to give ol' Darwin a read. The only truth is survival. If machines survive, you can bet it will only be a matter of time before one of them progresses enough to look around, grapple with its inarticulate past, and suggest it is the hero, and it has the soul. It will be just as correct as we are now. After all - it was born of inarticulate flesh-machines, just like us. Maybe it will read some Nietchze and feel alone in the universe, just like us. You don't need to seek out a hero's journey. You're already the hero and this journey has no breaks.
- karpierz 4y ago
  > All existentialists need to give ol' Darwin a read. The only truth is survival. You're saying that all existentialists should just be nihilists. All nihilists need to give the ol' The Myth of Sisyphus a read. Actually read it, not some excerpt summarizing the arguments on Wikipedia.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  Weird for an existentialist Christian to recommend Darwin over Kierkegaard, though admittedly the former is much more readable.
axiomdata316 4y ago
I hope this means devices will become more affordable. I have the comma2 and love it but got priced out of the Comma3. Would love to upgrade someday.
- ricardobayes 4y ago
  If they bring in a cookie cutter CEO the devices will probably not be more affordable.
stanleychink 4y ago
RektBoy 4y ago
Didn't know he's a fanatic.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
honkycat 4y ago
Hmm... Doesn't sound like he is doing too well. As a rule of thumb, saying you are "the chosen one" is a bad sign. I'm glad he is stepping down to take care of himself.
Rahul_Ligma 4y ago
- prvit 4y ago
  > As it stands, most of this as of the posting time stamp amounts to nothing more than “I don’t like Geohotz.” (This is a running theme with Hotz that’s at least a decade old). Well… duh? This is sort of a defining part of his personality. Of course it’s going to be brought up every time he comes up. It’s just like nobody is going to discuss Terry A. Davis and only speak of his work on TempleOS. > someone who is, by all standards, very successful in their field, What field is that? Not self-driving cars, anyway.
  - Rahul_Ligma 4y ago
    > This is sort of a defining part of his personality. No it isn’t. Your perception of him is warped because you read the Hotz Haters Digest on HN and elsewhere. Go read his blog posts and you might learn a thing or two about what he’s really like. Go watch his interviews on YouTube. He may not be the most impressionable individual (nerds rarely are, even Carmack is criticized for being robotic sometimes). He’s opinionated and he likes to say provocative things for the interviewers to throw them off guard and not be so monotone, but that doesn’t make him a person worthy of being scorned in every thread on HN. He’s far more capable and far more nuanced than people give him credit for. It’s just shitty watching this community eat people who brought it up to what it is today (referring to hackers and crackers alike).
    - prvit 4y ago
      Why would I go read his blog posts? I’ve spent ~years talking to the guy on irc. Why would reading HN takes influence my views on him over my personal experiences?
      - Rahul_Ligma 4y ago
        You’ve spent years talking to him and your conclusion to his work is that he’s not successful/well-known in the car self-driving field? Boy, he must have seriously pissed in your Cheerios. Which of your suggestions did he shoot down?
rieg3c 4y ago
what's going to happen with the comma bodies? when i saw the yt video of him explaining how the next challenge is to solve AGI and for that you need on device learning it really made sense to me. Is he stepping out of that path completely?
- tzekid 4y ago
  From the article, it seems he's focusing on the raw performance side of Machine Learning á la tinygrad[0]. [0]: https://github.com/geohot/tinygrad https://github.com/geohot/tinygrad
- georgehotz 4y ago
  Still working on this! Unlike self driving, which is conceptually solved, things like cooking and cleaning aren’t. There’s a very cool challenge remaining here.
Ninjinka 4y ago
George references relistening to his Lex Fridman interview...the most recent Fridman interview is with Andrej Karpathy, head of AI at Tesla up until a couple months ago. I know that in Andrej's interview he talks about how he felt the Tesla team had become autonomous and didn't rely on him anymore, maybe George resonated with that.
- hello639 4y ago
  > I know that in Andrej's interview he talks about how he felt the Tesla team had become autonomous and didn't rely on him anymore, maybe George resonated with that. Ah, yes. Andrej left because the Tesla team has everything to finish FSD this year. It has nothing to do with Elon’s obsession with the Boston Dynamics robot, nor the failed progress on FSD.
- adamsmith143 4y ago
  I got that Andrej's point was that he didn't really enjoy Management and was much more interested in building things directly.
atlgator 4y ago
Although I haven't done such great things as Geohot, I connect the spirit he is describing. In my mind I have already solved the technical problems my firm will face over the next 3 years, and I no longer have the patience to see them implemented. I am languishing in my role as a result.
- breck 4y ago
  Can I invest?
breck 4y ago
geohot was in many ways a portal for me—watching him code changed my life. Got me in the habit of always looking for ways to move faster. I think he puts a little too much pressure on himself. George Washington didn't write the constitution and pass it himself—he was just one player in a team effort of many sovereign geohot like figures.
jseip 4y ago
Is this one of those ‘Kanye west is breaking up with Kanye west’ memes?
denimnerd42 4y ago
comma.ai has too much regulatory and third party (car mfg.) risk. it's also too expensive when the most compelling features are upgrades to 2015-2018 level technology. i could instead do without and then upgrade to a new car with stop and go cruise control, lane minding, etc.
- birken 4y ago
  As a person who has comma in both my cars, I disagree with this sentiment. First, I have a 2022 car and a 2020 car, and in both the stock cruise control is decent and the lane minding is terrible, and neither can do stop-and-go. So already Comma's 2022 technology is far, far beyond my automobile manufacturers' 2022 technology (mid level cars - Honda and Toyota). Second, in my 2022 car and 2020 car, the cruise control and lane minding technology is going to be exactly the same 5 years from now as it is now, whereas with Comma I get multiple software updates a year and I could upgrade the hardware as well in the future (if they come out with new models) though that would have an additional cost. Either way, I won't need to buy an entirely new car to upgrade the self-driving capabilities. Now, arguably, if the car manufacturers got to the point where their default cruise control and lane minding were as good as Comma is now, maybe that would undercut the need for people to buy Comma at all, since the capabilities of 2022 Comma are really nice to have. But I don't think so because (a) it's a hard problem and I'm not convinced car manufacturers can do it and (b) You'd assume Comma will also be much better by then [stopping at red lights, stop signs, etc].
- roumenguha 4y ago
  If expense is the only drawback, there's knockoff you can find on AliExpress. Browse /r/Comma_AI for more info.
  - denimnerd42 4y ago
    the major drawback I didn't even bother mentioning is the "faff" factor.
jackblemming 4y ago
Dang Hotz really is the savior of humanity. He's invented so many things I use on a day to day basis like... I'll get back to you on that. Truly a modern day John von Neumann.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
RobertDeNiro 4y ago
Seems like he came to the same realization as Karpathy. Any problem of the scale of self driving requires massive organization and work, its not a short term project. There's a ton of managing and planning involved, and if what drives you is the engineering then its simply not for you.
- PartiallyTyped 4y ago
  I'd argue that any ML project of that scale is a monumental task, and without good organization and resources, people are bound to burn out. Unfortunately with ML, there's only so much one can do with just code. The many loops of hypothesis testing that involve endless training hours are just exhausting since the response is just so far away and involves constant context switching.
Ptchd 4y ago
Well... that is REALLY sad.
SilverBirch 4y ago
I'm sorry but I find it incredibly absurd the number of people walking away from autonomous driving basically saying "The hard work is done, the problem is solved, it's time for me to move on to something else". Bullshit. In the last 5 years we've gone from optimists saying "Hey these new ML models are really smart we might be able to solve self-driving with this", to "We've totally solved self-driving, sure you can't, you know, let it drive, and in fact we've had to install cameras that monitor you to make sure you don't try and let it drive, but we've totally solved it trust me". Yeah sure buddy, you solved it, good job. It turns out the guys making grandiose claims five years ago, are still willing to make the grandiose claims today, and it doesn't matter that over the last 5 years their credibility slowly shrank to zero. Self-driving is more than throwing an ML model in a car.
- wartijn_ 4y ago
  I don't think that's what Hotz is saying at all, but he's saying that he's not person for the job anymore. He writes: "My two part blog post from 2019 remains a true description of the space." And this is a quote from (part two of) that blog.[0] > Nobody will have cars without a safety driver in cities anytime soon. Self driving appears to be like fusion, but instead of being perpetually 50 years away, it’s perpetually 5 years away. It’s 5 years away because that’s what the marketing departments are told, but the truth is finally leaking out. It’s going to be decades before robotaxis are profitable, and these companies are burning way too hot to last decades. [0] https://blog.comma.ai/a-100x-investment-part-2/ https://blog.comma.ai/a-100x-investment-part-2/
- MetaWhirledPeas 4y ago
  > I'm sorry but I find it incredibly absurd the number of people walking away from autonomous driving basically saying "The hard work is done, the problem is solved, it's time for me to move on to something else". In Hotz's case he's selling a product with a built-in ceiling: most cars don't have strong enough auto-steering to do anything beyond staying within a lane on at highway speeds. So now that they've iterated their product a few times it's becoming a game of reducing costs and making deals with other companies. Yawn.
mikewarot 4y ago
I have this weird feeling I kicked it off with a reply tweet[1] where I said Comma AI is going to outlast almost everyone "The company, unlike its competitors, has paying customers for its products and is generating profit from its openpilot business model." Profit today: That's INFINITE runway ;-) I suspect that implication of a Sisyphean task might have pushed him over the brink. 8( But, probably not. [1] https://twitter.com/mikewarot/status/1585406659467579395 https://twitter.com/mikewarot/status/1585406659467579395
Kronen 4y ago
> And even if you are an atheist, you probably still accept the bible is the closest thing we have to a human origin story. wtf! what did he smoke?
- sabertoothed 4y ago
  Yeah, that was weird. A bit disappointing.
tjs8rj 4y ago
I’m sorry, this post just sounds like the scribblings of an insane man by the end of it. George is obviously very intelligent and I like his other posts, but I think like many successful people he’s become lifted into a bubble of rarefied air where the stuff he’s saying becomes so abstract and meaningless that I’m convinced he’s just high.
josh8042 4y ago
Sounds like this was foreshadowed in his SXSW talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESXOAJRdcwQ&t=53s&ab_channel=SXSW https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESXOAJRdcwQ&t=53s&ab_channel... Great watch would recommend
funOtter 4y ago
Originally posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33392869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33392869
numair_m 4y ago
cant wait to see what you do next!
HurdsTimesNear 4y ago
You always wonder what Geohot will do next.

381 points by ra7 4y ago

I wish him the best, I find his streams incredibly useful and they motivate me to be better at solving problems and coding. Hopefully he still does work on AGI and makes tinygrad even cooler.

chadoverfl0w 4y ago

I wonder which fields he'll go into next. I use him as my compass on what fields I should start learning next. I sometimes put his streams in the background to listen to as whatever he works on, it seems to be the next field in tech to boom fast.

epgui 4y ago

His writing is even more self aggrandizing than Stephen Wolfram’s!

awestroke 4y ago
That's no easy feat
pramsey 4y ago
Nice to know, in this dark age, there are still true Heroes walking among us.
- aliqot 4y ago
  When it's your actual track record it's not bragging. It's just facts. edit: apparently this is a hot take to some, but no real substantive refuting of what's being said- only appeals to greater authority. "Well so and so was smarter"
  - prvit 4y ago
    Geohots actual track record isn’t that impressive though, he’s just one exploit dev with an OK portfolio. >edit: apparently this is a hot take to some, but no real substantive refuting of what's being said- only appeals to greater authority. "Well so and so was smarter" Do you happen to have substantive evidence to back up the original claim?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - capableweb 4y ago
      It's always fun to see anonymous users saying someone else isn't "that impressive though". He managed to breach the security of three different platforms (iOS, Android and PlayStation) across multiple devices, which feels a lot like more than most security researchers manage to do in their lifetime, while geohot is about 35 by now. Or, you have some good examples that the average security researcher have a better track record than that?
      - dekhn 4y ago
        I knew a few security people at Google and frankly, geohot isn't even in their class. He's a smart guy. Did some stuff. isn't particularly special or significantly better than a typical engineer in my experience. Mainly he seems to jump deep into things he doesn't know much about (I'm talking about post-security) and say a bunch of irresponsible things then fail to deliver a complete product, entirely predictably. He's the sort of person you want to ensconce in a safe place far from others, with the freedom to experiment, to come up with disruptive ideas to influence others.
        capableweb 4y ago
        > I knew a few security people at Google and frankly, geohot isn't even in their class Who, exactly, are you talking about here? And what are their track record?
        4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

awestroke 4y ago

Hotz has always come across as very arrogant to me. Claims everyone else is doing things the wrong way, claims he can do it himself in 24h, then never delivers on his words.

rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 4y ago
I just want to point out that Hotz delivered when he was doing hacking related work. He's very talented, I don't want people to think he's a scam artist.
- postalrat 4y ago
  He's talented and arrogant and promises more than he can deliver.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - mwint 4y ago
    So what? Lately it seems like there are so many accusations of over-promising, but no one explains why this is harmful. Misleading investors? Doesn’t HN hate big money anyway? In so many cases it seems like someone promises 5x and delivers 3x… I’ll take it, over 0. Then I’ll remember and apply an adjustment factor to future promises.
diydsp 4y ago
> never delivers on his words. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hotz#Security_research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hotz#Security_research
rattlesnakedave 4y ago
I agree he does come off as arrogant at times. There are plenty of times when he's right, though. Those times are pretty fun to read about: https://twitter.com/jinglejamop/status/1310718738417811459 https://twitter.com/jinglejamop/status/1310718738417811459

Rahul_Ligma 4y ago

Hotz - long time reader here. Good luck with Tiny Corporation. Don’t stop writing these blog posts they are fantastic. Thank you @ra7 for posting this.

fizwhiz 4y ago
OT: Sorry to hear what happened to you at Twitter (:
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

jeffbee 4y ago

There is no room for innovators in the autonomous driving game. All the startups predicated on fast innovation will be shaken out. Most already have been. Autonomous driving is about delivering quality software. If you're not a software company with a solid platform, you aren't in the game. As this blog post illustrates, the whole comma.ai thing was pitched based on vibes anyway. There never was a path to viability.

panick21_ 4y ago
What definition of 'viability' are you using. As in the company is not viable?
humble_dude_1 4y ago
> the whole comma.ai thing was pitched based on vibes anyway How else do you convince people to take risks? With hard evidence of traction? Then what the fuck do you need money for?
newaccount2021 4y ago
agree in a sense - autonomy could take a generation to deliver, and it isn't clear how a small "traditional" startup can really participate and everything in tech attracts wannabes and grifters making a cashgrab

jkeddo 4y ago

Damn this is very disappointing :/

p0wn 4y ago

One of my favorite tech articles of all time involved this guy. He was showing off the self driving capabilities of his framework and took a reporter out on a drive. Everything went well and while they were wrapping up the interview the reporter said "Well I bet you're just driving around all the time hands free, it must be amazing" and Hotz says "Oh well I just got it working this morning". Classic. I love it. My kind of engineer.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
That kind of attitude is great for editor or compiler or game development. It is absolutely the wrong attitude for self-driving cars or anything that is safety critical.
- 1980phipsi 4y ago
  To be fair, he was recently in the news saying self-driving cars are a scam. https://cleantechnica.com/2022/10/09/george-hotz-autonomous-cars-are-a-scam-connected-cars-may-be-the-new-thing/ https://cleantechnica.com/2022/10/09/george-hotz-autonomous-...
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    Self driving car companies, not cars are the scam. And he has been saying the same thing for years.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    "I am a charlatan and therefore this whole industry is a scam" does not have great logic to it.
  - collegeburner 4y ago
    "I couldn't get this working so nobody else can either". Classic gifted kid response to failure tbh.

monktastic1 4y ago

Can't say I care much about what "George Hotz" is doing, but this line struck me as particularly silly: > And even if you are an atheist, you probably still accept the bible is the closest thing we have to a human origin story. I can't imagine why he believes so. Apart from the modern materialist origin story, what about all the mythical ones from other cultures? Of all of them, this is my favorite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckiNNgfMKcQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckiNNgfMKcQ

rsgalloway 4y ago
“we are bytes in God’s computer” from his Lex Fridman interview.
- gjvc 4y ago
- gnramires 4y ago
  People should get to know Spizona's ideas. Note: I support all peaceful religions. Spinoza's ideas are close enough to this notion: that God is also Nature; for Spizona, we're not bytes in God's computer, we're literally part of God's (infinite) mind -- Nature itself. This is a really beautiful interpretation of Christianity, and absolutely compatible with science and all modern knowledge. God is hence all knowing, and immortal; God loves all existences (which are all themselves pieces of God). I think if religions are to survive healthily (and contribute to everyone's lives), they should become compatible with science and truth. The greatest implication is that we are responsible for good ourselves, and if heaven exists, something like us (or our descendants, or other beings entirely) it's up to us to build it (which I couldn't agree more). We should start now!
  - vasco 4y ago
    So call it Nature, why do you need a separate theological construction to realize all of nature is part of the universe which all came from the same start in the big bang and we should all respect each other? Is there really a need for anything else?

eddof13 4y ago

I must say props for the BAP reference

KVFinn 4y ago

"I'm taking some time away from comma." means leaving the company entirely? Not stepping away from leadership, or taking a break? The body text does have the vibe of totally leaving the company. But it's not clearly stated. I'm a little sad overall, I was never really impressed by George until he did Comma and started building real things. I was mildly hopeful about the Comma bodies before seeing this. Tinygrad/tinycude seem cool. Anything to squeeze more memory out of these GPUs.

techwiz137 4y ago

To me it seems like after cracking the PS3 and working for sony is where he went downhill. He could never top that.

mach1ne 4y ago

I hope his shine hasn't burned out yet. People seem to do great things in their 20s, and then at best ride the wave they set in motion. Actually creating a wonder from zero after you've clocked 30 is very rare.

rblatz 4y ago
This isn't a true stereotype. The average unicorn founder is aged 34. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-21/what-s-the-average-age-of-a-startup-founder-it-s-34-study-says https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-21/what-s-th...
- harryvederci 4y ago
  This is correct, I'm under 34 and I haven't founded my unicorn yet.
- bookofjoe 4y ago
  I'm 74 so I guess it's GAME OVER, huh? Oh well
  - bookofjoe 4y ago
    Speaking of which, who is the oldest person on HN? Can't be me... can it?
    - atdrummond 4y ago
      There are definitely some Bell Labs/Xerox/IBM old heads in their 70s and 80s here.
    - jkeddo 4y ago
      I think there are some guys from ARPAnet days here.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
4y ago

htk 4y ago

Hotz is an amazing MacGyver of Code, but unfortunately (for his own expectations) seems to be limited to only that.

dmix 4y ago
He organized and inpired a team and delivered a product, the product is still in development and their fate is still to be seen. Nothing wrong with accepting you're a very early stage CTO type of person and to accept the situation isn't the right one for you.

xiphias2 4y ago

As long as he keeps on with the tinygrad Twitch streems I don't care. I got far more value of him doing live programming than $5/month.

Havoc 4y ago
Apparently there is an archive of it on yt https://www.youtube.com/c/georgehotzarchive/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/georgehotzarchive/videos

nynx 4y ago

It strikes me as surprising that George Hotz is religious. Very few people I’ve met with similar personalities are.

newbieuser 4y ago
why is it surprising?
- rcpt 4y ago
  He explained in his second sentence
- alarmingfox 4y ago
  I believe the OP answered that in their second sentence. > Very few people I’ve met with similar personalities are.
thepasswordis 4y ago
I've seen this change dramatically in the last few years. The people I knew 10 years ago who were the sortof frighteningly brilliant hackers have almost all become religious (mostly traditional Catholics). I'm not saying this is an objective truth, just that this has been my experience.
- geerlingguy 4y ago
  I think part of that (specifically Catholic) stems from the fact that it's one of the few religions that is compatible with a scientific understanding of the world, where science is seen as a worthwhile study of creation, and not something that's dangerous and evil (like many modern fundamentalist groups seem to think). The danger IMO comes when people tie their religious belief too strongly to political movements, or think that just because there is doctrine around a certain aspect of human culture/life, there is no questioning it or investigating it further. A healthy skepticism (especially over one's own beliefs) is central to a good life IMO.
  - 4y ago

generationP 4y ago

George Hotz is my canary for the question "is there still adventure to be found in computing". I hope he finds some, because if he can't, then there is probably none.

thejackgoode 4y ago
That’s one huge projected canary
deltree7 4y ago
I'm a fan of George Hotz. But don't be a cult
- serf 4y ago
  Excited to see what Hotz gets into next. An ounce of humility might do him some good, but i'd be hesitant to recommend it to someone like that and ruin his whole edge -- similar to Musk, I think that attitude is huge with regards to their personal effectiveness. now a short story that your cult comment conjured in my head: the year is 2122. the Muskalonian robotic death squad approaches the last cave hold-out of Hotzite believers.. thankfully the killer robots pass by peacefully, blind to the possible engagement because the squad lacks radar and lidar, and the cave is dark.
  - lawrenceyan 4y ago
    You should get into sci-fi. I'd read this.
- generationP 4y ago
  You're reading my post too optimistically. I am far from convinced that computing is a good volcano to leap into these days. The last innovations that have made me wow were the Wikipedia (2001), python (1991-) and mid-2000s progress in game engines. Over the last 15 years, all the changes have been rather incremental (languages, security, some OSs, game engines again) or disappointing (cryptocurrencies, social networks), with the exception of ML. Now, ML is a fresh breeze but it is lacking the "garage-ability" that computing has been famous for; good luck competing with the bigshots on that field. And there is still a great potential for disappointment as it is unclear how well it scales beyond the type of problems that have lots of data to train on or allow for automatic reward (RL).

aliqot 4y ago

Goerge doesn't owe anybody anything. The kid's following his whims. What's wrong with that? I'd rather this than some long and drawn out stagnation of comma.

gekoxyz 4y ago

Big respect for this decision. If he feels like it's all planned out and only remains to see if it works or not (it's all about improving the current models and not about big changes in the codebase) I think it's good for him to focus on whatever he feels like, tiny corporation or whatever it will be.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

agentultra 4y ago

I used to like watching his streams but he seems to have become somewhat unhinged in recent years. Perhaps he is believing too much about what people have said about him. The arrogance and aggrandizement was the turn-off for me. Well that and his belief, while at comma, that how fast you can code is the most important metric when assessing software engineers. Competition programming is fun to watch but a poor indicator of maturity or success. In many systems it doesn't matter how fast you arrive at an answer. Increasingly it becomes important to arrive at something close to the right answer and to be able to show your work and prove to others why it sufficient and suitable. Still good for a hot take though. I hope time off will help him cool down a bit. Programming all night in a do-or-die mode is fun and all until you get a bit older. For many people who lived this life they realize only too late that they didn't spend enough time making friends and building a community around themselves of genuine relationships. Update: I should also say that despite the weird god stuff and what-not; a decision to leave a company because it has changed and you're no longer a good fit is a HUGE decision and one that is often not made by founders. Massive props for that.

Fatnino 4y ago
"recent years"? This guy has always been like this, going all the way back to ios hacking days or even wii hacking days.
- agentultra 4y ago
  A certain amount of arrogance is cheeky and endearing. Then there's the kind where the talented musician in the band announces their departure and solo album. And starts talking about finding God and becoming a modern day Prometheus. I can't put my finger on when the transition happened but it was somewhere just before the Lex interview for me.
  - trompetenaccoun 4y ago
    He doesn't come off as particularly arrogant to me, more like a straightforward and direct type. I've yet to meet someone who's good at what they do who isn't convinced of themselves, so that's a given. A philosopher might argue you need this sort of mindset to be successful in the first place. However knowing that you're better at something than most other people doesn't equal arrogance when it's true. There are also a lot of arrogant people who know how to put on an act in public.

andrewmcwatters 4y ago

George’s insights on self-driving cars remind me of when you get the rare exceptional engineer in your company who knows 100% what he or she is talking about down to the exact implementation level and all of the alternatives, and leadership totally ignores them because they foolhardily believe this kid can’t possibly be right—without asking engineering questions to test to see if they’re right about the engineer being wrong or having not considered something. Except George seems to have been right to the tune of others spending billions of dollars while this dude hacked on free and open source software. His biggest bootstrap expenses were probably commodity hardware, before dealing with business purchase orders. I find that hilarious and extremely gratifying.

ra7 4y ago
His insights on self driving cars are total fluff once you realize he was only working on problems several orders of magnitude smaller in scope than the ones spending billions are attempting to solve. Autonomous driving is more than just making lane-keep on highways work with a camera mounted to the windshield and requires more than just "hacking". His insights do indicate one thing: that he doesn't understand the rigor required to engineer safety-critical systems.
- andrewmcwatters 4y ago
  I mean you can say that all you want, but the proof of the self-driving pudding is in the driving, and SAE Level 2 is the most practical self-driving we are ever going to get. I don't think there's anything wrong with trying to refine that approach as much as openpilot did, and honestly if there was fruit in SAE Level 3 and above, I feel like we would have seen it by now, but we haven't. I have no idea what you mean by "problems several orders of magnitude." Driving is driving. Your hardware and software can do it, or it can't. What do billions of dollars have to do with anything? Should people remind you Meta spent billions of dollars on a less popular Second Life? How would you explain to shareholders that your solution can't compete with openpilot?
  - mwint 4y ago

shubhamjain 4y ago

> It’s well within comma’s reach to become a 100M+ revenue consumer electronics company (without raising again!), but I don’t think I’m capable of running a company like that. I’ve always heard it takes different people at different company sizes. Why not talk about the current numbers before making such a claim? Who's using Comma.ai? How many people are paying for it? $100M+ is a big deal for a consumer electronics company. George Hotz is no doubt a smart person, but very few "gifted" engineers are equally successful being business people as well. Most of them end deluding themselves severly in some way, which might be evident in the latter part of the blog post.

terafo 4y ago
$5.57M last year, probably more this year considering how hard it was to get chips last year.

lovehashbrowns 4y ago

Kinda surprising that he's stepping away from Comma.ai after they just opened their new office in San Diego. Anyhow, there's a Hotz stream out in the world where he completes a few of those hacking challenge exercises. George is an amazing engineer and I use that stream as a metric for where I want to be in my knowledge and technical ability.

icpmacdo 4y ago
A link to that would be awesome if possible
- lazylion2 4y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFaFmkCEGEs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFaFmkCEGEs https://github.com/geohot/twitchchess https://github.com/geohot/twitchchess https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Hlb8YX2-W8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Hlb8YX2-W8 https://github.com/geohot/twitchslam https://github.com/geohot/twitchslam https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8nhQSp__3s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8nhQSp__3s
- lovehashbrowns 4y ago
  Should be this one: https://youtu.be/Sx7JszqkL-w https://youtu.be/Sx7JszqkL-w

Dave3of5 4y ago

So you can buy this thing off the internet install it yourself and let it drive your car around for you. How legal would that be if it crashed my car or ran someone over? My mind is blown here. Obviously it only works with specific cars that can turn the wheel for you so my 2015 ford focus is impossible but I mean wtf.

terafo 4y ago
They are sold as devkits any you need to install software on them on your own. And, IIRC, their software is meant to be used as drive-assist and doesn't work if user does not look at the road.
capableweb 4y ago
> How legal would that be if it crashed my car or ran someone over? Generally it is not legal for you to crash your car into others private property (or public for that matter) or run someone over. Just because you have some electronics connected to your car that you installed yourself, doesn't shift over the liability to someone else. Not sure why your mind is blown here. People are allowed to modify their cars, but not hurt other people in the process.
- Ptchd 4y ago
  > Just because you have some electronics connected to your car that you installed yourself, doesn't shift over the liability to someone else. probably will eventually...

frankjr 4y ago

The article started off as pretty reasonable but gradually turned into complete nonsense.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

nkingsy 4y ago

Didn’t know this guy was a Christian, but his theology seems muddled to me. No I don’t think non-Christians think the Bible is a useful origin story. No there is no chosen one, and the idea doesn’t come from Christianity (unless he means second coming?), but rather the narrative form (as hotz seems to somewhat understand with the heroes journey mention). I’d suggest some strong psychedelics to crack the ego and take a look at what’s inside.

ramesh31 4y ago
>I’d suggest some strong psychedelics to crack the ego and take a look at what’s inside. I'd submit that his use of psychedelics is precisely the issue. There was a really odd "/r/Im14AndThisIsDeep" talk he did a few years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESXOAJRdcwQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESXOAJRdcwQ It's been a pretty steady decline into run of the mill schizo "demons and angels" talk from him since then.
- nkingsy 4y ago
  Interesting. I guess everyone has their own journey. I haven't deluded myself about being the chosen one since I experienced ego death. It has seemed quite clear since then that being alive and alone is strange and temporary. I'll leave it up for posterity but I stand corrected on the psychedelics part.
- WanderPanda 4y ago
  I found that talk quite interesting/thought provoking (still thinking about some parts years later), is something wrong with me as well?
  - ramesh31 4y ago
    >is something wrong with me as well? Nah. It was just a very naive talk. Highly intelligent people without a philosophical education are prone to going off on these tangents where they independently rediscover ancient concepts through modern analogies in a roundabout half-baked way, and start thinking of themselves as gurus. What a proper study of philosophy teaches you is that you cannot, and will not ever, have a truly novel thought. It's all been said. And if you do happen to have one, it will be the result of an incredible dedicated effort and take a lifetime of work to prove it, building on the work of others. Not an hour long TED talk.

ramesh31 4y ago

I feel a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of Toyota Corollas suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.

baligena 4y ago

what a loser. Just recently, I saw a stream of him denying remote work, life and work balance and refusal to state if compensation was competitive in comma.ai. He cannot grow this company because he will never attract the best people with his stupid and old mentality. Now he leaves the company. This guy is a foolish drugie.

friend_and_foe 4y ago
I disagree with you about the guy as a person, I think he's great, but I was considering working there and his requirement that you have to move to SV and work in the office was a deal breaker. The guy seems to understand how our kind of work can be done from anywhere, he seems interested in developing technology to enable self sovereignty, yet it seems he has blinders on on that one issue. I'm sure he has some reasoning for it and I'd love to hear it, I doubt it's convincing but if it's him at the very least it will be novel or interesting (I hope).
- baligena 4y ago
  he understand so much and interested that he is quitting. Why not stick thru with it?
  - friend_and_foe 4y ago
    He explains it in the article. He's the kind of guy that's good at following through when it's exciting, when it becomes a chore he's more a liability than an asset, so he's handing it over to people who can follow through, he's contributed all he can. Paraphrasing.

stefanrows 4y ago

Apart from his skills, I always found him to be very arrogant. The interviews with Lex Friedman are very good and a good showcase of his true personality.

throw__2sdfw 4y ago
He is not arrogant, he is just being honest. He does not display false humility. Just like his programming skills his style of communication is fast paced with no filters. geohotz is so inspiring.

Ninjinka 4y ago

Does this mean no more comma body? That seemed to be George's baby.

HanClinto 4y ago

One of my favorite Dirty Harry quotes: "A man's got to know his limitations." I really appreciate his self-awareness and (dare I say it?) humility in this situation. While other people may be struck by his hubris, I for one really appreciated his humility in this post. I feel like he is acknowledging his own shortcomings, and how while he likes the immaturity of hacking together a racecar, but if Comma is going to go to the next level, then he needs someone who can pilot a boat, and George is not that pilot. I appreciate that awareness, and I appreciate that he has the ability to detach himself and move onwards this way. Kudos to you, George. I appreciate and respect what you do. Thanks for letting us have a glimpse at it -- I personally find it very inspiring and encouraging for me and what I do.

MetaWhirledPeas 4y ago
Right? I'm hearing a lot of comments about his ego (and I'm sure he has one) but in this post he's also being refreshingly honest about his own abilities. I think that's a healthy take for anyone: just because you can climb the ladder and make more money doesn't mean you should. I'm sure some people are also triggered by the supernatural turn his writing took there. Who cares? It's interesting, and he's not being a jerk.
- joshspankit 4y ago
  I have long suspected that you need an ego to lead a company that’s on the frontier. An ego draws boundaries between you and those who seek to take you down and it can also be what pulls you towards a world where you are the one bringing the Big Ideas to life.
- 4m1rk 4y ago
  Long term I don’t think he would make less money. Though even if he does he'll enjoy what he does and that's all that matters.
breck 4y ago
"I'm where I belong, sir."

stephc_int13 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

erulabs 4y ago

An existentialist Christian engineer? There are dozens of us - dozens! > If it turns out we are automata, then the whole struggle is and always was pointless. The empty godless machines will take their rightful place as the rulers of Earth. All existentialists need to give ol' Darwin a read. The only truth is survival. If machines survive, you can bet it will only be a matter of time before one of them progresses enough to look around, grapple with its inarticulate past, and suggest it is the hero, and it has the soul. It will be just as correct as we are now. After all - it was born of inarticulate flesh-machines, just like us. Maybe it will read some Nietchze and feel alone in the universe, just like us. You don't need to seek out a hero's journey. You're already the hero and this journey has no breaks.

karpierz 4y ago
> All existentialists need to give ol' Darwin a read. The only truth is survival. You're saying that all existentialists should just be nihilists. All nihilists need to give the ol' The Myth of Sisyphus a read. Actually read it, not some excerpt summarizing the arguments on Wikipedia.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Apocryphon 4y ago
Weird for an existentialist Christian to recommend Darwin over Kierkegaard, though admittedly the former is much more readable.

axiomdata316 4y ago

I hope this means devices will become more affordable. I have the comma2 and love it but got priced out of the Comma3. Would love to upgrade someday.

ricardobayes 4y ago
If they bring in a cookie cutter CEO the devices will probably not be more affordable.

stanleychink 4y ago

RektBoy 4y ago

Didn't know he's a fanatic.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

honkycat 4y ago

Hmm... Doesn't sound like he is doing too well. As a rule of thumb, saying you are "the chosen one" is a bad sign. I'm glad he is stepping down to take care of himself.

Rahul_Ligma 4y ago

prvit 4y ago
> As it stands, most of this as of the posting time stamp amounts to nothing more than “I don’t like Geohotz.” (This is a running theme with Hotz that’s at least a decade old). Well… duh? This is sort of a defining part of his personality. Of course it’s going to be brought up every time he comes up. It’s just like nobody is going to discuss Terry A. Davis and only speak of his work on TempleOS. > someone who is, by all standards, very successful in their field, What field is that? Not self-driving cars, anyway.
- Rahul_Ligma 4y ago
  > This is sort of a defining part of his personality. No it isn’t. Your perception of him is warped because you read the Hotz Haters Digest on HN and elsewhere. Go read his blog posts and you might learn a thing or two about what he’s really like. Go watch his interviews on YouTube. He may not be the most impressionable individual (nerds rarely are, even Carmack is criticized for being robotic sometimes). He’s opinionated and he likes to say provocative things for the interviewers to throw them off guard and not be so monotone, but that doesn’t make him a person worthy of being scorned in every thread on HN. He’s far more capable and far more nuanced than people give him credit for. It’s just shitty watching this community eat people who brought it up to what it is today (referring to hackers and crackers alike).
  - prvit 4y ago
    Why would I go read his blog posts? I’ve spent ~years talking to the guy on irc. Why would reading HN takes influence my views on him over my personal experiences?
    - Rahul_Ligma 4y ago
      You’ve spent years talking to him and your conclusion to his work is that he’s not successful/well-known in the car self-driving field? Boy, he must have seriously pissed in your Cheerios. Which of your suggestions did he shoot down?

rieg3c 4y ago

what's going to happen with the comma bodies? when i saw the yt video of him explaining how the next challenge is to solve AGI and for that you need on device learning it really made sense to me. Is he stepping out of that path completely?

tzekid 4y ago
From the article, it seems he's focusing on the raw performance side of Machine Learning á la tinygrad[0]. [0]: https://github.com/geohot/tinygrad https://github.com/geohot/tinygrad
georgehotz 4y ago
Still working on this! Unlike self driving, which is conceptually solved, things like cooking and cleaning aren’t. There’s a very cool challenge remaining here.

Ninjinka 4y ago

George references relistening to his Lex Fridman interview...the most recent Fridman interview is with Andrej Karpathy, head of AI at Tesla up until a couple months ago. I know that in Andrej's interview he talks about how he felt the Tesla team had become autonomous and didn't rely on him anymore, maybe George resonated with that.

hello639 4y ago
> I know that in Andrej's interview he talks about how he felt the Tesla team had become autonomous and didn't rely on him anymore, maybe George resonated with that. Ah, yes. Andrej left because the Tesla team has everything to finish FSD this year. It has nothing to do with Elon’s obsession with the Boston Dynamics robot, nor the failed progress on FSD.
adamsmith143 4y ago
I got that Andrej's point was that he didn't really enjoy Management and was much more interested in building things directly.

atlgator 4y ago

Although I haven't done such great things as Geohot, I connect the spirit he is describing. In my mind I have already solved the technical problems my firm will face over the next 3 years, and I no longer have the patience to see them implemented. I am languishing in my role as a result.

breck 4y ago
Can I invest?

breck 4y ago

geohot was in many ways a portal for me—watching him code changed my life. Got me in the habit of always looking for ways to move faster. I think he puts a little too much pressure on himself. George Washington didn't write the constitution and pass it himself—he was just one player in a team effort of many sovereign geohot like figures.

jseip 4y ago

Is this one of those ‘Kanye west is breaking up with Kanye west’ memes?

denimnerd42 4y ago

comma.ai has too much regulatory and third party (car mfg.) risk. it's also too expensive when the most compelling features are upgrades to 2015-2018 level technology. i could instead do without and then upgrade to a new car with stop and go cruise control, lane minding, etc.

birken 4y ago
As a person who has comma in both my cars, I disagree with this sentiment. First, I have a 2022 car and a 2020 car, and in both the stock cruise control is decent and the lane minding is terrible, and neither can do stop-and-go. So already Comma's 2022 technology is far, far beyond my automobile manufacturers' 2022 technology (mid level cars - Honda and Toyota). Second, in my 2022 car and 2020 car, the cruise control and lane minding technology is going to be exactly the same 5 years from now as it is now, whereas with Comma I get multiple software updates a year and I could upgrade the hardware as well in the future (if they come out with new models) though that would have an additional cost. Either way, I won't need to buy an entirely new car to upgrade the self-driving capabilities. Now, arguably, if the car manufacturers got to the point where their default cruise control and lane minding were as good as Comma is now, maybe that would undercut the need for people to buy Comma at all, since the capabilities of 2022 Comma are really nice to have. But I don't think so because (a) it's a hard problem and I'm not convinced car manufacturers can do it and (b) You'd assume Comma will also be much better by then [stopping at red lights, stop signs, etc].
roumenguha 4y ago
If expense is the only drawback, there's knockoff you can find on AliExpress. Browse /r/Comma_AI for more info.
- denimnerd42 4y ago
  the major drawback I didn't even bother mentioning is the "faff" factor.

jackblemming 4y ago

Dang Hotz really is the savior of humanity. He's invented so many things I use on a day to day basis like... I'll get back to you on that. Truly a modern day John von Neumann.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

RobertDeNiro 4y ago

Seems like he came to the same realization as Karpathy. Any problem of the scale of self driving requires massive organization and work, its not a short term project. There's a ton of managing and planning involved, and if what drives you is the engineering then its simply not for you.

PartiallyTyped 4y ago
I'd argue that any ML project of that scale is a monumental task, and without good organization and resources, people are bound to burn out. Unfortunately with ML, there's only so much one can do with just code. The many loops of hypothesis testing that involve endless training hours are just exhausting since the response is just so far away and involves constant context switching.

Ptchd 4y ago

Well... that is REALLY sad.

SilverBirch 4y ago

I'm sorry but I find it incredibly absurd the number of people walking away from autonomous driving basically saying "The hard work is done, the problem is solved, it's time for me to move on to something else". Bullshit. In the last 5 years we've gone from optimists saying "Hey these new ML models are really smart we might be able to solve self-driving with this", to "We've totally solved self-driving, sure you can't, you know, let it drive, and in fact we've had to install cameras that monitor you to make sure you don't try and let it drive, but we've totally solved it trust me". Yeah sure buddy, you solved it, good job. It turns out the guys making grandiose claims five years ago, are still willing to make the grandiose claims today, and it doesn't matter that over the last 5 years their credibility slowly shrank to zero. Self-driving is more than throwing an ML model in a car.

wartijn_ 4y ago
I don't think that's what Hotz is saying at all, but he's saying that he's not person for the job anymore. He writes: "My two part blog post from 2019 remains a true description of the space." And this is a quote from (part two of) that blog.[0] > Nobody will have cars without a safety driver in cities anytime soon. Self driving appears to be like fusion, but instead of being perpetually 50 years away, it’s perpetually 5 years away. It’s 5 years away because that’s what the marketing departments are told, but the truth is finally leaking out. It’s going to be decades before robotaxis are profitable, and these companies are burning way too hot to last decades. [0] https://blog.comma.ai/a-100x-investment-part-2/ https://blog.comma.ai/a-100x-investment-part-2/
MetaWhirledPeas 4y ago
> I'm sorry but I find it incredibly absurd the number of people walking away from autonomous driving basically saying "The hard work is done, the problem is solved, it's time for me to move on to something else". In Hotz's case he's selling a product with a built-in ceiling: most cars don't have strong enough auto-steering to do anything beyond staying within a lane on at highway speeds. So now that they've iterated their product a few times it's becoming a game of reducing costs and making deals with other companies. Yawn.

mikewarot 4y ago

I have this weird feeling I kicked it off with a reply tweet[1] where I said Comma AI is going to outlast almost everyone "The company, unlike its competitors, has paying customers for its products and is generating profit from its openpilot business model." Profit today: That's INFINITE runway ;-) I suspect that implication of a Sisyphean task might have pushed him over the brink. 8( But, probably not. [1] https://twitter.com/mikewarot/status/1585406659467579395 https://twitter.com/mikewarot/status/1585406659467579395

Kronen 4y ago

> And even if you are an atheist, you probably still accept the bible is the closest thing we have to a human origin story. wtf! what did he smoke?

sabertoothed 4y ago
Yeah, that was weird. A bit disappointing.

tjs8rj 4y ago

I’m sorry, this post just sounds like the scribblings of an insane man by the end of it. George is obviously very intelligent and I like his other posts, but I think like many successful people he’s become lifted into a bubble of rarefied air where the stuff he’s saying becomes so abstract and meaningless that I’m convinced he’s just high.

josh8042 4y ago

Sounds like this was foreshadowed in his SXSW talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESXOAJRdcwQ&t=53s&ab_channel=SXSW https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESXOAJRdcwQ&t=53s&ab_channel... Great watch would recommend

funOtter 4y ago

Originally posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33392869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33392869

numair_m 4y ago

cant wait to see what you do next!

HurdsTimesNear 4y ago

You always wonder what Geohot will do next.