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.