You’re Thinking About Autonomous Vehicles Wrong

If you follow the feats of hackerdom, you remember George Hotz. In 2007, he was the 17-year-old from New Jersey who made headlines for unlocking an iPhone’s carrier settings—a world first. A few years later, he broke into a PlayStation 3 and got sued by Sony (they eventually settled out of court). In 2015, he got into a tiff with Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who had previously tried to hire him, over vows to build a semi-autonomous driving software that essentially reproduced Tesla’s Autopilot.

That was also the year Hotz launched his own self-driving startup, Comma.ai, which recently raised $5 million in venture capital and employs 14 people out of their San Francisco offices. Hotz says he kept his word to Musk: He claims that Comma.ai’s “Open Pilot” system performs better than Autopilot.