26-year-old George Hotz first made a name for himself back in 2007 when he became the first person to hack Apple’s iPhone. After attending – and being bored by – college, and bouncing around the IT field for the past few years, Hotz developed a growing interest in AI.
This past fall the resident of San Francisco set out to bypass Google and Tesla and build a self-driving car using commercially available electronics parts, in his garage. According to Bloomberg , it took him one month to adapt his Acura ILX to successfully navigate the highways around northern California autonomously.
Hotz takes particular pride in being able to create a working self-driving car for a fraction of the cost of the products being developed by major players in the field like Tesla, Google and Uber. He also claims that the driver-assist technology widely used by the big companies, which is supplied by Israeli firm Mobileye, is behind the times and hampering the development of usable, affordable self-driving cars.