George Hotz, a.k.a GeoHot, is a pioneer of the iPhone jailbreaking scene as he was the first to come up with a method that allowed people to put custom applications and what not on their iOS devices. He even managed to jailbreak the PlayStation 3 but got in quite a bit of trouble for that as Sony took legal action. He has been out of the spotlight for some time but now it has emerged that he has actually been working on a self-driving car.
Bloomberg published a new profile on the man today, revealing that he has been working on this project since October this year, it’s a regular Acura ILX sedan that he’s working with and it appears to actually work right now even though it has been like two months that he’s been working on this project.
Hotz wants to remove Mobileye from the scene, it’s a company which provides driving aid systems, the kind that Tesla’s Autopilot runs on. Apparently Elon Musk has picked up on his work and even offered him a job with a “multimillion-dollar bonus,” but Hotz turned him down as he says Musk’s deal terms kept changing.
His self-driving car system is different from what the others are doing. Instead of programming rules about driving the car uses AI deep learning that it picks up by “watching” Hotz drive around. He plans on driving an Uber for the next few months to rapidly train the system. No plans for commercialization of this technology have been made yet, the product itself is far from finished, though Hotz thinks he may sell the system to car manufacturers or even as separate kits directly to customers for close to $1,000.
For now Hotz has set a target in his mind, he’s going to film a video of his self-driving system “outperforming” the Model S in Autopilot when crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, because apparently that’s something Autopilot has a bit of trouble with due to poor lane markings.
Filed in . Read more about Autopilot, Geohot, Self-Driving Cars and Tesla.