Famous hacker Geohot assembled an unmanned car in his garage



    American hacker George Hotz , better known by his nickname Geohot, became famous when he released the first ever jailbreak for iPhone. A seventeen-year-old student hacked the iPhone in 2007, and three years later became the author of the Sony PlayStation 3 jailbreak.

    George now has a new mega-project: a home-made unmanned car . The guy rejected a job offer at Tesla with a multi-million bonus. He does everything on his own.

    What is most surprising is that he succeeds. After the alteration, the Acura ILX sedan rides fairly well on the highway, no worse than the Tesla autopilot. And this despite the fact that Geohot began work on the project in October .

    Hotz showed autopilot in action to a Bloomberg reporter on Interstate 280 on the outskirts of San Francisco. When he turned on the autopilot at the entrance to the S-turn at a speed of 100 km / h, the journalist only prayed quietly.

    Here's what a car interior looks like.



    We see a 21.5-inch display in portrait mode (in Tesla, the display is only 17 inches). The computer is running Ubuntu Linux, like Tesla, and displays technical information about the autopilot, data from cameras and lidar.

    The system unit of the central computer is located directly in the glove compartment.

    Geohot began work on autopilot by submitting an online application to register as an authorized Honda service center. The application was approved - and he got access to reference manuals and diagrams for Acura. After that, he began to connect to car systems. Soon, the glove compartment in the car was full: Intel NUC mini-computer, a pair of GPS modules, a router.

    Glove box close-up. Near the parking brake, Hotz added a joystick for more convenient operation. A button on the joystick activates the autopilot system. A lidar is installed on the roof of the car. The tracking system consists of six cheap cameras costing about $ 13 - about the same installed in smartphones.











    In recent years, Geohot spent changing various works that did not bring intellectual satisfaction to his genius - Google, SpaceX, Facebook, nothing interesting. On Facebook, the smartest developers are busy with the problem of how to get users to click on ads. “It scares me what Facebook is doing with AI,” says Geohot. “They use machine learning technology to encourage people to spend more time on Facebook.”

    For fun Geohot participated in various hacking competitions. For example, at Pwnium, he hacked into a Chromebook and won a prize of $ 150,000. Another $ 50,000 came from the found 0day vulnerability in the Firefox browser at the Pwn2Own contest. At a hacking contest in South Korea for teams of four, Geohot performed alone and won first place ($ 30,000).

    By 2012, he was tired of competitions and George became interested in artificial intelligence and neural networks. He read all the literature and the latest scientific papers on this topic. Now he says that he knows absolutely everything in this field.

    Now Geohot founded his own company comma.ai . Its goal is to compete with Mobileye, a developer of driving assistance systems. It was this company that helped develop autopilot in Tesla cars, as well as in other cars. He spent the money earned at the competitions for the purchase of Akura and equipment for a home-made autopilot.

    An amateur project attracted the attention of Ilon Mask. Bloomberg writes that he offered the hacker work on a branded autopilot and a bonus of several million dollars. George refused.

    Geohot explains that its autopilot is fundamentally different from those on the market. It does not rely on a set of programmed rules. The system is a self-learning neural network that "monitors" the actions of the driver. In reality, software only takes up about 2,000 lines of code. The neural network is already driving excellently on the highway, is being rebuilt from strip to strip, slows down and accelerates as needed, fits perfectly into turns and does not require driver participation for many, many kilometers. For example, if an autopilot sees a cyclist, he frees him a little strip, because Geohot did this in the past.

    Either in jest, or in earnest, George says that he intends to tax through Uber for several months to give the system enough information.

    The problem is that with such training, the system will overcome human errors, but if you work with several drivers, the errors of specific driving styles will be nullified.



    So far, work on the system has just begun; there are no plans for commercialization. But in the long run, if the project succeeds, then Geohot would like to sell the system to car manufacturers or sell kits for upgrading cars at retail at a price of around $ 1,000.

    In the coming months, George promises to shoot a video. There he will demonstrate how his system surpasses the Tesla Model S autopilot.

    ... Sitting on a dirty couch in his garage, George Hotz philosophizes about artificial intelligence and the future of mankind: “Slavery did not disappear because everyone suddenly became moral,” he says. - The reason why slavery disappeared lies in the industrial revolution; it made physical labor unclaimed. The last 150 years, the foundation of the economy has been the human mind. We are now on the verge of a new industrial revolution. The entire Internet is currently equal in computational power to about ten human brains, but this will not always be the case. ”

    “After 10 years, a significant part of the human labor force will become unnecessary. After 25 years, AI will be able to do almost everything that a person can. The last working profession will be AI programmers. ”

    In the future, people will be happy to immerse themselves in virtual reality: “This is already happening now,” says Geohot. “People go to work, sit in front of their computer all day, and then sit in front of their computer at home.” After 20 years, sitting in front of a computer will become much more fun when the virtual worlds surpass in size everything that is on this Earth: “We will have a better world. We can truly live in a society of reason. ”

    The hacker is working on autopilot because he sees it as the first step in this revolution. Transport is the area where AI is able to exert a significant influence and free up the maximum number of people from work. Geohot then hopes to adapt technology for supermarkets so that AI replaces cashiers.

    They are driven by a purely hacker philosophy “I don't need money,” he says. I need power. Not over people, but over nature and the fate of technology. I just want to know how it all works. ”


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