George Hotz

Early Life and Education

George Francis Hotz was born on October 2, 1989. He attended the Academy for Engineering and Design Technology at Bergen County Academies, a magnet public high school in Hackensack, New Jersey, and is an alumnus of the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth program. He also briefly attended Rochester Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon University.

Hotz demonstrated an early aptitude for science and engineering, competing as a finalist at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) in 2004 with a project titled "The Mapping Robot" and again in 2005 with "The Googler." At the 2007 ISEF, his 3D imaging project "I Want a Holodeck" earned awards in several categories, including a $20,000 Intel scholarship, and led to an invitation to speak at the Stockholm International Youth Science Seminar in Sweden. In March 2008, PC World listed him among the top 10 Overachievers under 21.

Security Research

iOS

In August 2007, at seventeen years old, Hotz became the first person reported to remove the SIM lock on an iPhone. He traded one of his unlocked 8 GB iPhones to Terry Daidone, founder of CertiCell, in exchange for a Nissan 350Z and three 8 GB iPhones. In October 2009, he released blackra1n, a jailbreak tool compatible with all iPhone and iPod Touch devices running iOS 3.1.2. On July 13, 2010, he announced the discontinuation of his jailbreaking activities, though he continued releasing new techniques through October 2010, including limera1n, one of his final jailbreak tools.

PlayStation 3

In December 2009, Hotz announced his intention to breach security on the PlayStation 3. By January 22, 2010, he had gained read and write access to the system's memory as well as hypervisor-level access to its CPU, releasing the exploit publicly on January 26, 2010. Sony responded in March 2010 by announcing a firmware update that would remove the OtherOS feature from PlayStation 3 models.

Sony Lawsuit

In January 2011, following a presentation at the 27th Chaos Communications Congress by hacking group fail0verflow that exposed a flaw in Sony's use of ECDSA signatures, Hotz posted a copy of the PlayStation 3's private key on his website. Sony filed for a temporary restraining order against him in the US District Court of Northern California on January 11, 2011. The case drew significant public attention, with Sony seeking IP address data from social media platforms and PayPal. In April 2011, Sony and Hotz settled out of court, with Hotz agreeing never to resume hacking work on Sony products.

Android

In June 2014, Hotz published towelroot, a one-click Android rooting tool built around the CVE-2014-3153 vulnerability in the Linux futex subsystem. Originally released for the Verizon Samsung Galaxy S5, it was subsequently made compatible with a wide range of Android devices. Samsung responded by releasing updated software immune to the exploit.

Career

Hotz worked at Facebook between May 2011 and January 2012. In July 2014, Google hired him to work with the Project Zero security team, where he developed Qira, a tool for dynamically analyzing application binaries. He was employed at the startup Vicarious from January until July 2015. In late 2022, following Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter, Hotz joined the company for a 12-week internship focused on fixing Twitter search and removing a login prompt shown to non-logged-in users. He resigned after less than five weeks.

comma.ai

Hotz founded comma.ai in September 2015 to develop advanced driver-assistance systems using machine learning. An early prototype, a self-driving Acura ILX demonstrated on California's Interstate 280, prompted a cease-and-desist letter from the California Department of Motor Vehicles. After the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration requested compliance information about the planned "comma one" device, the company canceled it in October 2016 and instead released its driving software, openpilot, as open-source software. Subsequent hardware products included the comma two (2020) and comma three (2021). In November 2020, Consumer Reports ranked openpilot above all other advanced driver-assistance systems tested, including Tesla Autopilot and Cadillac Super Cruise. As of 2025, openpilot supports over 300 vehicle models, with users having accumulated over 100 million miles driven. Hotz stepped down from day-to-day leadership in October 2022 but remained on the board.

tiny corp

Hotz founded tiny corp on November 5, 2022, with the aim of porting machine learning instruction sets to hardware accelerators. In May 2023, tiny corp announced $5.1 million in funding to develop computers for machine learning and to advance tinygrad, a neural network framework designed to balance the simplicity of micrograd with the functionality of PyTorch. tinygrad is used to run comma.ai's openpilot on dedicated hardware. tiny corp also produces the tinybox, a $15,000 AI computer aimed at local model training and inference.

Recognition and Other Activities

In August 2013, Hotz competed at DEF CON as part of Carnegie Mellon's Plaid Parliament of Pwning (PPP), which placed first in the DEF CON Capture the Flag tournament. Later that year, competing alone under the pseudonym tomcr00se, he took first place at the NYU Tandon CSAW competition. In August 2014, PPP won the DEF CON CTF tournament for a second consecutive year and also won the DEF CON "Crack Me If You Can" tournament. Hotz has also pursued music, releasing hip hop tracks on SoundCloud, and conducts programming livestreams on Twitch. In February 2020, he founded the cheapETH cryptocurrency.