George Hotz is famous for having unlocked the iPhone and PlayStation 3.
Among the battery of measures that Elon Musk plans to execute on Twitter are the reduction of the workforce, marathon working hours, return to 100% face-to-face, encrypted voice and video calls, postponement of the relaunch of the payment verification service and an improvement the search engine of the social network.
But that is not all. He now he again summoned a famous hacker named Cold George,famous for performing jailbreaks (the process of removing some of the limitations imposed by a device) on an iPhone with iOS system and reverse engineering processes on Playstation 3.
Hotz, known as Geohot, is the founder of Comma.ai, a company that develops autopilot systems for cars. In 2015 Musk tried to hire him for Tesla,but they did not end well since, according to the hacker, Elon changed the contract conditions several times.
As George Hotz explains on his Twitter profile, he will be working for a season at the microblogging company. His task will be to fix its search function, as well as remove the message that prevents the user from browsing the service on the web without logging in. for 12 weeks,will dive into the platform to improve the service.
As a test, he asked online “How do you think the quality of the search on Twitter is? What would drive you to use Twitter search instead of Google?” she tweeted.
His message never ceases to surprise, because Musk has never talked about competing in this field with Google, probably the most used search engine in the world with millions of daily queries.
In exchange, according to a conversation on Twitter with Musk, the CEO of the social network will pay the hacker’s living expenses in San Francisco. Hotz tweeted that he would be willing to do a twelve-week internship in exchange for room and board.
In this way, in just a couple of years, Hotz has gone from being part of Facebook and Google and being wanted by Tesla to working for Twitter for free.
Some users were skeptical that the hacker could pull it off in 12 weeks after an entire team of engineers couldn’t fix it for years.
Who is George Hotz?
At the age of 26, Hotz set out to build the ultimate self-driving car, a clear challenge to the auto giants and especially Tesla. In fact, he heads Comma.ai, a company that creates driver-assistance technology that can be retrofitted into existing cars.
Hotz argued that driving, at least fully autonomous level 5 driving, will require a holistic approach rather than viewing the problem as a series of small, manageable problems. This is a long-fought argument in machine learning: what level of abstraction is the right one?
The young man was firm in his decision: he was going to achieve what the company for the design, manufacture and sale of electric cars led by Elon Musk had not achieved until then.
“It is extremely unlikely that a single person or even a small company that lacks extensive engineering validation capabilities could produce an autonomous driving system that can be implemented in production vehicles,” Musk’s company said in a statement.
Hotz said at the time that he had been discussing the possibility of working for Tesla, but that the plans fell through when Musk kept changing the terms of their deal. “I appreciate the offer,” he replied, “but like I said, I’m not looking for a job. I’ll ping you when I squash Mobileye.”