George Hotz
Very interesting person.
https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2024/11/20/a-place-for-me.html
“By the way, if you ever see me in public, I don’t care that you are a fan, I don’t understand why people think I would. If you want to talk, why would you open with that? Tell me something technical that I don’t know. Then we are having a conversation.”
“you can understand individual components but not the whole system”
I became a fan after watching his coding livestreams.
- Was the first to jailbreak an iPhone
- Started his own self-driving car company
You learn Assembly to appreciate C Language. You learn C Language to appreciate Python.
Thoughts on meeting George Hotz: Before going into the hackathon and meeting George Hotz, I was like “I have this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to meet George Hotz. When I meet him, I want to pick his brain”. Meeting George Hotz was one of the most humbling experience to realize that I still have a very long way to go in my journey as an engineer. It was inspiring to see someone so capable and knowledable. When I met him, I knew I was f-cked. He going on a rant to his employees and I only understood < 50% of what he was talking about lol. His brain is spinning so much faster than the average human.
George Hotz was also doing the hackathon with us as he wanted to test out tinygrad on the Comma Body, and so he was up at 3am with red eyes drinking moutain dew (i think that’s what he drink). It was quite a cool experience.
He is just operating at a different wavelength, and it’s like I’m not even part of the conversation because the caliber of intellect of that conversation was so high.
Why were things like diversity and gender studies so many word?
- GI Bill: Bill to go to school in the 50s
- Captured by a bureaucratic class: you get status seekers
- student loans backed by government
- overproduction of elites
- LLM → Video foundation models
Difference between Humans and AI
- Human Compute vs. Silicon Compute: Human compute is still way ahead
A big bottleneck is compute.
There are the ideas of humans competing with
- LLM society
LLMs coding
We were talking about the differences between human and LLM intelligence. What are the differences?
- Is compute the only difference?
Thing I want to ask:
- Think about when python was invented. This is the most similar to the LLM revolution.
What makes up intelligence?
- George argues that just being fast doesn’t mean it will out compute.
- There are difficult problems that an LLM just can’t ever solve.
He talks about how robustness is why Google, Meta, etc. are paying so much for human beings.
Is everything just a reasoning problem.
There are 2 things in terms of difference between Humans vs. LLMs:
- Humans being able to operate together. Work on such complex systems. LLMs can’t do that. Because of all the levels of reasoning. We can say we say let’s go build a bridge. Jump around between different levels of abstractions.
- Human being judged by others. Decisions are made by consensus which makes us make better intelligence. That’s swarm intelligence
And until we get those things, human will be ahead of LLMs.
C++ → Python We’ll have Python → Language?
So LLM won’t replace programming for at least another 10 years.
He talks about how Elon Musk is a Modernist (thinks about everything in terms of a Physics problem), whereas he calls himself a Post-Modernist (thinks about everything in terms of a Information Theory perspective).
Other learnings:
- learn to use the
tcommand in Vim, which is super useful combined with the deletedcommand with the brackets- although you can also do
di(andda(
- although you can also do
“My central thesis about the world is there’s things that centralize power and they’re bad, and there’s things that decentralize power and they’re good. Everything I can do to help decentralize power, I’d like to do”.
He shared some links on what shaped his views:
Have Maslow’s Pyramid for debating skills, where the bottom of the pyramid is Ad Hominem.
Notes
Comma Con
Spoke to him for a little bit.
Was asking him on his thoughts on SLAM.
End-to-end solutions aren’t necessarily the end all, be all.
- Do you want your kids to be better than you? Of course. But why not AIs.
Talk
comma ai | Three Stories - The Past, Future, and Present | George Hotz | COMMA_CON talks | comma 3X
Ideas that stood out:
- George Hotz is driven by the idea that he can change the trajectory of humanity. Else, why are you here?
- Why would you work a way so something can change the entry for how much money you have in a SQL database.
I like the values that he pointed out, and one of them was about Humble:
- And it wasn’t about the individual humbleness, because truth be told that he is better than most people. He means being humble in the face of nature, because you don’t know the obstacles you are going to face… there’s more of a point afterwards?