Monday: How one hacker is changing the world

George Hotz is the most important programmer you’ve (probably) never heard of.

Author

Felix Newport Mangell
June 28th, 2024 • Reading Time: 11 minutes

Picture from The Telegraph

Afternoon Change Makers,

It's our pleasure to welcome a guest piece by Felix Newport Mangell and what a piece it is. 

Our favorite stories of change makers are the ones you have never heard of. Today's piece contains hacks, wrap battles, autonomous cars and a war with Nvidia.

Read on,
Jack and Will

Introduction

George Hotz is the most important programmer you’ve (probably) never heard of.

One summer’s evening, in August 2007, a short video posted on YouTube showed a young hacker demoing the world’s first SIM-unlocked iPhone. This was big news. Apple’s exclusive carrier partnership with AT&T meant that if you wanted to use an iPhone, you had to play by their rules, and pay the man. Now though, with a SIM-unlock, the consumer was given the freedom to choose the carrier that they wanted. The next day, Apple stock jumped.

The star of this video was the then 17-year old George Hotz, a.k.a “geohot”, and for the past two months of his holiday, he had been working day and night, multimeter in hand, single-mindedly focused on breaking AT&T’s monopoly. 

Motivated by this goal and backed by a small army of donating fans, he documented the entire process on an incredible series of blog posts, and by combining forces with hackers all over the globe he managed to get his iPhone to call his home phone on a T-Mobile SIM. He subsequently traded it for 3 more iPhones and a Nissan 350z.

A 90-second clip was all George needed to cement his name in the hacker hall of fame, launching him to elite status among security nerds and IRC chat-rooms. Since then, he has embodied the definition of a Change Maker, blending a unique combination of exceptional technical ability, and an unbending will to realise his mission: building better technology, and getting it into as many people’s hands as possible.

Today, he is the CEO of the tinycorp, which aims to “commoditize the petaflop”. In English, that translates to the goal of single-handedly taking on all AI infrastructure incumbents (looking at you, NVIDIA) by unlocking the potential of cheap, consumer-grade compute. 

George Hotz is a fascinating character now positioned at the forefront of AI: he’s come a long way since his explosion into public life in 2007. His life is a tale of monopoly-toppling hacks, court cases, self-driving cars, legendary twitch rants, accelerating artificial intelligence, and of course, lots of hacking.

The Hacker who raps 

It didn’t take long for Hotz to set his sights on another corporate giant: Sony. In a blog post dated 2009, he announced that he had “read/write access to the entire [Playstation 3] system memory, and [hypervisor] level access to the processor.” In other words, he had hacked the PS3, and was the first to do it.

Subsequently, he released code and a tutorial, detailing how to replicate the hack on other PS3s. Hotz had made a special effort to make it impossible to use pirated video games: in his own words what was most important to him was ‘the freedom to use the device you paid for in any way you see fit’. Sony published a firmware update two months after the exploit, rendering the hack ineffective.

Later that year, perhaps out of frustration with Sony’s counteraction, George released a more sophisticated exploit for the Playstation 3, along with the PS3 private key, enabling arbitrary software to be run on the devices, including pirated games. This was a step too far in the eyes of Sony, who filed a lawsuit against Hotz. 

Unfazed, Hotz dropped a diss track.

“You're fucking with the dude who got the keys to your safe and
Those that can't do bring suits
Cry to your Uncle Sam to settle disputes”

The next few months saw huge numbers of internet activists escalating efforts to punish Sony for their retaliation against Hotz - DDOSing Sony servers and hacking into databases, releasing thousands of compromised account details.

In the fallout of this warfare, Hotz’s voice quieted on hacker forums of the internet, and he decided to stop sharing his exploits. The extreme campaigns embarked on by hacker groups against Sony, with whom he had never collaborated, was not his idea of empowering people to use their devices without restrictions. In April 2011, it was revealed that Sony and Hotz had settled the lawsuit out of court, on the condition that Hotz refrained from hacking Sony products. 

After the Sony saga, Hotz began to turn his focus away from hacking things. Still driven by a relentless curiosity and desire to make an impact, Hotz embarked on a new journey – one that involved building useful products rather than breaking into them.

Between 2011-2015 Hotz was working at Silicon Valley startups: Facebook, Google, and SpaceX, but the hacker’s itch persisted. It was during this period that he started to explore the world of autonomous vehicles and machine learning.

Company Number One, as Hotz refers to it, is Comma.ai. “If Tesla is the iOS of self-driving cars, Comma is the Android” he explained in a Lex Fridman interview. Comma’s mission is very simple: to make driving chill. 

How do they do that? 

Comma’s strategy is unique: enhance existing cars by retrofitting an advanced system on top of existing driving assist features. That means taking a car with the right hardware and software, and adding another highly sophisticated layer. A car with lane assist and cruise control now becomes one with:

  • Automated Lane Centering

  • Adaptive Cruise Control

  • Lane Change Assist

  • Driver Monitoring 

Today, you can add the comma system onto more than 250 vehicle models. The most recent iteration in their product suite is the comma 3X, and the whole thing runs on openpilot software, an open source project started by Hotz that anyone can see, re-write, and improve.

Like Android’s slow start and gradual climb to mobile OS dominance, in April 2024 it was made clear that Comma.ai has caught up to the big self-driving systems. It set the Cannonball record running on a Toyota Prius. It didn’t just set the record though, it smashed it, beating the previous record by 12 hours at 98.4% autonomy. The previous record holder? A Tesla model S which took 55 hours, at 97.7% autonomy.

Hotz started comma.ai in 2015, and in late 2022 stepped back from day-to-day running of the company to start his next company, putting the pedal to the metal one layer down the artificial intelligence stack. 

tinygrad

Hotz wasted almost no time getting started on his next idea (after a brief 4-week internship at newly Musk-owned twitter). Having spent years working on training and running enormous self-driving models, he was perfectly positioned to revolutionise the way AI models are trained and run. 

In the age of LLMs, compute is king. NVIDIA knows this, because since the release of ChatGPT its market cap has almost 10x-ed from $400b to $3T today. NVIDIA has been printing money because they make the world’s best GPUs, the chips that LLMs (like GPT-4) need to run, and run fast.

There are a number of reasons LLMs run best on NVIDIA chips, and one massive reason is because of the low-level optimisations that the CUDA programming language enables. CUDA is a C-like language that only NVIDIA GPUs can run; it’s very efficient and very fast.

Now, most programmers don’t program in CUDA, they program in a high-level language like Python, and there are specialised libraries (massive packages of code that help translate from one language to another), dedicated to turning Python code (slow), into highly optimised CUDA code (fast), tailor-made to make the most out of GPUs. PyTorch is an example of one of these, TensorFlow is another.  

Python -> Neural Network Library (PyTorch, TensorFlow) -> CUDA -> NVIDIA GPU

When it comes to AI chip companies, there really isn’t any competition right now. The combination of high-quality hardware + software tooling (CUDA) leaves no question when deciding which chips to buy in order to train or run an AI model - NVIDIA dominates the space.

“With the way AI is going, we risk large entities controlling the majority of the compute in the world.” Hotz warns in a blog post. This is a scary thought for freedom-loving Hotz. Combining his programming skills with his drive to decentralise power from incumbents, George is building tinygrad, a software library that accelerates model training and inference across a much wider range of AI chips by optimising the code that runs on each of them.

The key to what makes this work is simplicity. Tinygrad is around 5,000 lines of Python - while PyTorch and TensorFlow (its main competitors) are probably closer to 200,000 and 1,000,000 lines of code. By distilling patterns of machine learning into fewer lines of code, geohot has made it orders of magnitude simpler to run optimised software on a wider range of chips like Cerebras, Groq, and AMD.

One of the tiny corp’s short-term goals is to get AMD chips on the MLPerf benchmark using the tinygrad framework. If this goal is achieved, it opens the door for more hardware designers to create high-quality AI accelerator chips without needing to build a bespoke software layer like PyTorch and CUDA.

This all a technical way of saying the George Hotz is taking a swing at the big guys, like he has done his whole career. What he is building presents a huge challenge to NVIDIA by enabling innovation from new players to accelerate AI development and performance at the hardware level. 

Are we seeing peak $NVDA?

Wrapping up

Hotz defines a hacker as “somebody with a set of skills,” and points out that the skills alone don’t make you good or evil. It’s up to you to decide how to use them. Someone like Mark Zuckerberg may be his generation’s most famous hacker, but Hotz most embodies its original spirit. He hacks for the technical challenge and the fun [The New Yorker].

Hackers and entrepreneurs share a common DNA of relentless curiosity and a desire to disrupt the status quo. Both are driven by an urge to solve problems, often unconventionally. They thrive on challenges, viewing obstacles not as roadblocks but as puzzles to be deciphered. Hackers can be labeled as nefarious but what they are truly plagued by is a desire for change. George has channeled this into new entrepreneurial endeavors, ones which might etch his name in the Change Makers Hall of Fame.

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