George Hotz

About

George Hotz is a programmer who founded comma.ai, maker of the open source openpilot driver assistance software, and later the tiny corp. At the tiny corp he leads tinygrad, a deliberately small neural network framework, and sells tinybox AI computers, with the stated goal of commoditizing the petaflop. He writes often on his blog about AI economics, open models and compute.

Known for

• Broke the carrier lock on the iPhone as a teenager
• Built comma.ai, an open source driving assistance company whose openpilot software adds driver assistance to existing cars
• comma devices running openpilot support more than 350 car models across 27 brands
• Founded the tiny corp to build tinygrad, a minimal neural network framework that also runs openpilot's driving model
• Built the tinybox line of local AI training and inference computers, and won an AMD contract to benchmark the MI350X on MLPerf Llama 405B training

Key points

• Argues that AI progress comes mainly from the steady advance of general computing, so frontier labs will not capture most of the value as the technology commoditizes
• Argues AI will be strongly deflationary, making knowledge work cheaper rather than enriching the companies that build models
• Argues that a competitive AI chip has to start with an excellent ML framework and developer tools rather than with the chip itself, pointing to NVIDIA's CUDA ecosystem

• GDP is fake, electricity is real | George HotzEndgame with Amanda CassattMar 2026
• The Real Future of AI with George HotzEndgame with Amanda CassattMay 2025
• AI Doom Debate: George Hotz vs. Liron ShapiraDoom DebatesJun 2024
• EP 221 George Hotz on Open-Source Driving AssistanceThe Jim Rutt ShowFeb 2024
• George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & GodLex Fridman PodcastJun 2023