#132 – George Hotz: Hacking the Simulation & Learning to Drive with Neural Nets

George Hotz (geohot) is a programmer, hacker, and the founder of Comma.ai. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – Four Sigmatic: https://foursigmatic.com/lex and use code LexPod to get up to 40% & free shipping – Decoding Digital: https://appdirect.com/decoding-digital – ExpressVPN: https://expressvpn.com/lexpod and use code LexPod to get 3 months free EPISODE LINKS: Comma.ai’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/comma_ai Comma.ai’s Website: https://comma.ai/ George’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/georgehotz George’s Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/georgehotz George’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/realgeorgehotz Comma.ai YouTube (unofficial): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwgKmJM4ZJQRJ-U5NjvR2dg PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: – Check out the sponsors above, it’s the best way to support this podcast – Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman – Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman – Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LexFridmanPage – Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. 00:00 – Introduction 07:02 – Will human civilization destroy itself? 09:49 – Where are the aliens? 14:36 – Tic Tac UFO and Bob Lazar 17:04 – Conspiracy theories 19:07 – The programming language of life 23:28 – The games that humans play 31:58 – Memory leaks in the simulation 34:29 – Theories of everything 36:14 – Ethereum startup story 44:02 – Cryptocurrency 53:28 – Self-help advice 57:08 – Comma.ai 59:02 – Comma two 1:07:50 – Tesla vs Comma.ai 1:16:53 – Driver monitoring 1:30:34 – Communicating uncertainty 1:32:22 – Tesla Dojo 1:38:50 – Tesla Autopilot big rewrite 1:45:09 – How to install the Comma Two 1:49:44 – Openpilot is Android & Autopilot is iOS 1:58:59 – Waymo 2:10:12 – Autonomous driving and society 2:12:24 – Moving 2:15:29 – Advice to Startups 2:28:32 – Programming setup 2:31:32 – Ideas that changed my life 2:39:37 – GPT-3 2:42:57 – AGI 2:47:00 – Programming languages that everyone should learn 2:53:33 – How to learn anything 2:56:05 – Book recommendations 3:04:28 – Love 3:06:17 – Psychedelics 3:08:38 – Crazy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  The following is a conversation with George Hots, aka GeoHots, his second time on the podcast. He's the founder of Kama AI, an autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicle technology company that seeks to be, to Tesla Autopilot, what Android is to the iOS. They sell the Kama 2 device for $1,000 that, when installed in many of their supported cars, can keep the vehicle centered in the lane even when there are no lane markings. It includes driver sensing that ensures that the driver's eyes are on the road. As you may know, I'm a big fan of driver sensing. I do believe Tesla Autopilot and others should definitely include it in their sensor suite.

• 0:43Lex Fridman?

  Also, I'm a fan of Android and a big fan of George for many reasons, including his nonlinear out-of-the-box brilliance and the fact that he's a superstar programmer of a very different style than myself. Styles make fights and styles make conversations. So I really enjoyed this chat and I'm sure we'll talk many more times on this podcast. Quick mention of each sponsor followed by some thoughts related to the episode. First is 4Sigmatic, the maker of delicious mushroom coffee. Second is Decoding Digital, a podcast on tech and entrepreneurship that I listen to and enjoy. And finally, ExpressVPN, the VPN I've used for many years to protect my privacy on the internet.

• 1:29Lex Fridman?

  Please check out the sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that my work at MIT on autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles led me to study the human side of autonomy enough to understand that it's a beautifully complicated and interesting problem space, much richer than what can be studied in the lab. In that sense, the data that Kama AI, Tesla Autopilot, and perhaps others like Catalog Super Cruises are collecting, gives us a chance to understand how we can design safe semi-autonomous vehicles for real human beings in real-world conditions. I think this requires bold innovation and a serious exploration of the first principles of the driving task itself.

• 2:15Lex Fridman?

  If you enjoyed this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars and up a podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Fridman. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now and no ads in the middle. I'll try to make these interesting, but I give you timestamps. So if you skip, please still check out the sponsors by clicking the links in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. This show is sponsored by Four Sigmatic, the maker of delicious mushroom coffee. It has lion's mane mushroom for productivity and chaga mushroom for immune support. I don't even know how to pronounce that. I don't know what the heck it is, but it balances the kick of the caffeine nicely to give me

• 2:57Lex Fridman?

  a steady boost of focus in long, deep work sessions. Apparently, it doesn't leave you with a quote, awfully jittery feeling of caffeine, though I don't think I get that jittery feeling from any kind of supplement, caffeine, Red Bull, or otherwise. I'm pretty sure my body's mostly made up of caffeine at this point. To be honest, I drink coffee and tea more for the comforting warmth and the ritual of it. I don't think the caffeine even works anymore. I find that little rituals like these help calm the mind enough to settle in for the deep, distraction-free thinking. Anyway, exclusively for you, the listener of this podcast, get up to 40% off and free shipping on mushroom coffee bundles. To

• 3:42Lex Fridman?

  claim this deal, go to foursigmatic.com/lex or use the code LexPod at checkout. Again, you'll save up to 40% and get free shipping when you go right now to foursigmatic.com/lex or enter code LexPod at checkout and feel your productivity and creativity with some delicious mushroom coffee.

• 4:07Lex Fridman?

  This show is also sponsored by the Decoding Digital Podcast that is hosted by AppDirect co-CEO Dan Sacks. It's a relatively new show I started listening to where every episode is an interview with an entrepreneur or expert on a particular topic in the tech space. I liked the recent interview with Michelle Zatlin of CloudFlare about security. I've been progressively getting more and more interested in hacking culture, both on the attack and the defense side. So this conversation was a fun, educational 45 minutes to listen to. I think this podcast has a nice balance between tech and business that many of you might enjoy, especially if you're thinking of starting a business yourself

• 4:51Lex Fridman?

  or work at a startup. As you may or may not know, I'm thinking through this process myself, finding the balance between careful planning and throwing caution to the wind and just going with the heart, with the gut. Anyway, check out Decoding Digital on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Give them some love and encouragement to help make sure that the podcast keeps going. This show is also sponsored by ExpressVPN. It looks like the Social Dilemma documentary on Netflix has gotten people to talk about surveillance capitalism and the value of your data. As you may know, I see our social media systems as somewhere between totally broken and needing improvement. But one of

• 5:35Lex Fridman?

  the key aspects is for people to get more control over their data. ExpressVPN is one mechanism for doing that because it hides your IP address, which websites can use to personally identify you. Using ExpressVPN makes your activity more difficult to trace and sell to advertisers. Obviously, at least from my perspective, the responsibility should be on the social networks themselves. But for now, a good VPN like ExpressVPN can help. I'm also working on a bunch of different technological solutions to this problem. So if you don't like the idea of tech companies exploiting your personal information,

• 6:13Lex Fridman?

  then visit expressvpn.com/lexpod right now and you can get three months extra of ExpressVPN for free. That's expressvpn.com/lexpod to protect your data. Again, go to expressvpn.com/lexpod to learn more. I think they wanted me to say that like 20 times, but I'll stick to just three. And now here's my conversation with George Hots.

• 7:02Lex Fridman?

  So last time we started talking about the simulation. This time, let me ask you, do you think there's intelligent life out there in the universe?

• 7:09George Hotz?

  I've always maintained my answer to the Fermi paradox. I think there has been intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.

• 7:16Lex Fridman?

  So intelligent civilizations existed, but they've blown themselves up. So your general intuition is that intelligent civilizations quickly, like there's that parameter in the Drake equation. Your sense is they don't last very long.

• 7:30George Hotz?

  Yeah.

• 7:31Lex Fridman?

  How are we doing on that? Like, have we lasted pretty, pretty good?

• 7:34George Hotz?

  Oh, no.

• 7:34Lex Fridman?

  Are we do?

• 7:35George Hotz?

  Oh, yeah. I mean, not quite yet. Well, it's totally as Yudkowsky, the IQ required to destroy the world falls by one point every year.

• 7:46Lex Fridman?

  Okay, so technology democratizes the destruction of the world.

• 7:52George Hotz?

  When can a meme destroy the world?

• 7:56Lex Fridman?

  It kind of is already, right?

• 7:58George Hotz?

  Somewhat. I don't think, I don't think we've seen anywhere near the worst of it yet. World's gonna get weird.

• 8:04Lex Fridman?

  Well, maybe a meme can save the world. Have you thought about that? The meme lord Elon Musk fighting on the side of good versus the meme lord of the darkness, which is, I'm not saying anything bad about Donald Trump, but he is the lord of the meme on the dark side. He's the Darth Vader of memes.

• 8:24George Hotz?

  I think in every fairy tale, they always end it with, and they lived happily ever after. And I'm like, please tell me more about this happily ever after. I've heard 50% of marriages end in divorce. Why doesn't your marriage end up there? You can't just say happily ever after. So it's, the thing about destruction is it's over after the destruction. We have to do everything right in order to avoid it. And one thing wrong, I mean, actually, this is what I really like about cryptography. Cryptography, it seems like we live in a world where the defense wins. Versus like nuclear weapons, the opposite is true. It is much easier to build a warhead that splits into 100 little warheads than to build something that can, you know, take out 100 little warheads.

• 9:09George Hotz?

  The offense has the advantage there. So maybe our future is in crypto, but.

• 9:15Lex Fridman?

  So cryptography, right. The Goliath is the defense. And then all the different hackers are the Davids. And that equation is flipped for nuclear war. Cause there's so many, like one nuclear weapon destroys everything, essentially.

• 9:32George Hotz?

  Yeah, and it is much easier to attack with a nuclear weapon than it is to like, the technology required to intercept and destroy a rocket is much more complicated than the technology required to just, you know, orbital trajectory, send a rocket to somebody.

• 9:48Lex Fridman?

  So, okay, your intuition that there were intelligent civilizations out there, but it's very possible that they're no longer there. It's kind of a sad picture.

• 9:58George Hotz?

  They enter some steady state. They all wirehead themselves.

• 10:02Lex Fridman?

  What's wirehead?

• 10:04George Hotz?

  Stimulate their pleasure centers and just, you know, live forever in this kind of stasis. They become, well, I mean, I think the reason I believe this is because where are they? If there's some reason they stopped expanding, because otherwise they would have taken over the universe. The universe isn't that big. Or at least, you know, let's just talk about the galaxy, right? Seventy thousand light years across. I took that number from Star Trek Voyager. I don't know how true it is. But, um, uh, yeah, that's not big. All right, seventy thousand light years is nothing.

• 10:38Lex Fridman?

  For some possible technology that you can imagine that can leverage like wormholes or something like that.

• 10:43George Hotz?

  Oh, you don't even need wormholes. Just a von Neumann probe is enough. A von Neumann probe and a million years of sublight travel, and you'd have taken over the whole universe. That clearly didn't happen. So something stopped it.

• 10:54Lex Fridman?

  So you mean if you, right, for like a few million years, if you sent out probes that travel close, what's sublight? You mean, you're close to the speed of light?

• 11:03George Hotz?

  Let's say point one C.

• 11:04Lex Fridman?

  And it just spreads? Interesting. Actually, that's an interesting calculation. Huh. So what makes you think that we'd be able to communicate with them? Like, uh, yeah, what's, why do you think we would be able to be able to comprehend intelligent lives that are out there? Like, even if they were among us, kind of thing? Like, or even just flying around?

• 11:28George Hotz?

  Well, I mean, that's possible. It's possible that there is some sort of prime directive. That'd be a really cool universe to live in. And there's some reason they're not making themselves visible to us. But it makes sense that they would use the same, well, at least the same entropy.

• 11:47Lex Fridman?

  Well, you're implying the same laws of physics. I don't know what you mean by entropy in this case.

• 11:51George Hotz?

  Oh, yeah. I mean, if entropy is the scarce resource in the universe.

• 11:55Lex Fridman?

  So what do you think about like Stephen Wolfram and everything is a computation? And then what if they are traveling through this world of computation? So if you think of the universe as just information processing, then, uh, What you're referring to with entropy? And then these pockets of interesting, complex computations swimming around. How do we know they're not already here? How do we know that this? Like, all the different amazing things that are full of mystery on Earth are just like little footprints of intelligence from light years away?

• 12:32George Hotz?

  Maybe. I mean, I tend to think that as civilizations expand, they use more and more energy. And you can never overcome the problem of waste heat. So where is there waste heat?

• 12:42Lex Fridman?

  So we'd be able to, with our crude methods, be able to see like, there's a whole lot of energy here. But it could be something we're not, I mean, we don't understand dark energy, right? Dark matter. It could be just stuff we don't understand at all. Or they could have a fundamentally different physics, you know, like that we just don't even comprehend.

• 13:03George Hotz?

  Well, I think, okay, I mean, it depends how far out you want to go. I don't think physics is very different on the other side of the galaxy. I would suspect that they have, I mean, if they're in our universe, they have the same physics.

• 13:16Lex Fridman?

  Well, yeah, that's the assumption we have. But there could be like, super trippy things like, like our cognition only gets to a slice, and all the possible instruments that we can design only get to a particular slice of the universe. And there's something much like weirder.

• 13:35George Hotz?

  Maybe we can try a thought experiment. Would people from the past be able to detect the remnants of our, be able to detect our modern civilization? And I think the answer is obviously yes.

• 13:49Lex Fridman?

  You mean past from a hundred years ago?

• 13:51George Hotz?

  Well, let's even go back further. Let's go to a million years ago. The humans who were lying around in the desert probably didn't even have, maybe they just barely had fire. They would understand if a 747 flew overhead.

• 14:06Lex Fridman?

  Oh, in this vicinity, but not if a 747 flew on Mars? Because they wouldn't be able to see far? Because we're not actually communicating that well with the rest of the universe. We're doing okay, just sending out random like 50s tracks of music.

• 14:25George Hotz?

  True. And yeah, I mean, they'd have to, you know, the, we've only been broadcasting radio waves for um 150 years and well, there's your light cone. So.

• 14:36Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Okay. What do you make about all the, I recently came across this, uh, having talked to David Fravor, I don't know if you caught what the, the videos that Pentagon released and the New York Times reporting of the UFO sightings. So I kind of looked into it, quote unquote, and there's actually been like hundreds of thousands of UFO sightings, right? And a lot of it, you can explain in a way in different kinds of ways. So one is it could be interesting physical phenomena. Two, it could be people wanting to believe and therefore they conjure up a lot of different things that just, you know, when you see

• 15:18Lex Fridman?

  different kinds of lights, some basic physics phenomena, and then you just conjure up ideas of possible out there mysterious worlds. But, you know, it's also possible, like you have a case of David Fravor, who is a Navy pilot, who's, you know, a as legit as it gets in terms of humans who are able to perceive things in the environment and make conclusions whether those things are a threat or not. And he and several other pilots saw a thing, I don't know if you followed this, but they saw a thing that they've since then called TikTok that moved in all kinds of weird ways. They don't know what it is. It could be

• 16:03Lex Fridman?

  technology developed by, by the United States and they're just not aware of it on the surface level from the Navy, right? It could be different kind of lighting technology or drone technology, all that kind of stuff. It could be the Russians and the Chinese, all that kind of stuff. And of course, their mind. Our mind can also venture into the possibility that it's from another world. Have you looked into this at all? What do you think about it?

• 16:30George Hotz?

  I think all the news is a psyop. I think that the most plausible-

• 16:36Lex Fridman?

  Nothing is real.

• 16:37George Hotz?

  Yeah, I listened to the, I think it was Bob Lazar on Joe Rogan. And like, I believe everything this guy is saying. And then I think that it's probably just some like MKUltra kind of thing, you know?

• 16:51Lex Fridman?

  What do you mean?

• 16:52George Hotz?

  Like, they, they, you know, they made some weird thing and they called it an alien spaceship. You know, maybe it was just to like stimulate young physicists' minds. Tell them it's alien technology and we'll see what they come up with, right?

• 17:04Lex Fridman?

  Do you find any conspiracy theories compelling? Like, have you pulled at the string of the, of the rich, complex world of conspiracy theories that's out there?

• 17:14George Hotz?

  I think that I've heard a conspiracy theory that conspiracy theories were invented by the CIA in the 60s to discredit true things.

• 17:22Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 17:24George Hotz?

  So, you know, you can go to ridiculous conspiracy theories like Flat Earth and Pizza Gate. And, you know, these things are almost to hide like conspiracy theories that like, you know, remember when the Chinese like locked up the doctors who discovered coronavirus? Like, I tell people this and I'm like, no, no, that's not a conspiracy theory. That actually happened. Do you remember the time that the money used to be backed by gold and now it's backed by nothing? This is not a conspiracy theory. This actually happened.

• 17:54Lex Fridman?

  Well, that's one of my worries today with the idea of fake news is that when nothing is real, then like you dilute the possibility of anything being true by conjuring up all kinds of conspiracy theories. And then you don't know what to believe. And then like the idea of truth, of objectivity is lost completely. Everybody has their own truth.

• 18:21George Hotz?

  So you used to control information by censoring it. And then the internet happened and governments were like, oh shit, we can't censor things anymore. I know what we'll do. You know, it's the old story of, the story of like tying a flag where the leprechaun tells you his gold is buried. And you tie one flag and you make the leprechaun swear to not remove the flag. And you come back to the field later with a shovel and there's flags everywhere.

• 18:45Lex Fridman?

  That's one way to maintain privacy, right? It's like, in order to protect the contents of this conversation, for example, we could just generate like millions of deep fake conversations where you and I talk and say random things.

• 18:59George Hotz?

  Yeah.

• 19:00Lex Fridman?

  So this is just one of them and nobody knows which one is the real one. This could, this could be fake right now.

• 19:05George Hotz?

  Classic steganography technique.

• 19:08Lex Fridman?

  Okay, another absurd question about intelligent life. Cause uh, you know, you're, you're an incredible programmer outside of everything else we'll talk about, just as a programmer.

• 19:20Lex Fridman?

  Do you think intelligent beings out there, the civilizations that were out there had computers and programming? Did they, do we naturally have to develop something where we engineer machines and are able to encode both knowledge into those machines and instructions that process that knowledge, process that information to, to make decisions and actions and so on? And would those programming languages, if you think they exist, be at all similar to anything we've developed?

• 19:55George Hotz?

  So I don't see that much of a difference between quote unquote, natural languages and programming languages.

• 20:05Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 20:05George Hotz?

  I think there's so many similarities. So when I ask the question, uh, what do alien languages look like? I imagine they're not all that dissimilar from ours. And I think translating in and out of them, uh, wouldn't be that crazy.

• 20:23Lex Fridman?

  Well, it's difficult to compile like DNA to Python and then to see. There is a little bit of a gap in, in the kind of languages we use for, for touring machines and the kind of languages nature seems to use a little bit. Maybe that's just, we just haven't, we haven't understood the kind of language that nature uses well yet.

• 20:47George Hotz?

  DNA is a cat model.

• 20:50George Hotz?

  It's not quite a programming language. It has no sort of a serial execution. It's not quite a, yeah, it's a CAD model. So I think in that sense, we actually completely understand it. The problem is, you know, well, simulating on these CAD models. I played with it a bit this year is super computationally intensive. If you want to go down to like the molecular level, where you need to go to see a lot of these phenomenon like protein folding.

• 21:19George Hotz?

  So, yeah, it's not that it's not, it's not that we don't understand it. It just requires a whole lot of compute to kind of compile it.

• 21:26Lex Fridman?

  For our human minds, it's inefficient, both for the program, for the data representation and for the programming.

• 21:31George Hotz?

  Yeah, it runs well on raw nature. It runs well on raw nature. And when we try to build emulators or simulators for that, well, they're mad slow. And I've tried it.

• 21:41Lex Fridman?

  It runs in, yeah, you've commented elsewhere. I don't remember where that one of the problems is simulating nature is tough. And if you want to sort of deploy a prototype, I forgot how you you put it, but it made me laugh. But animals or humans would need to be involved in order to, in order to try to run some prototype code. On like, if we're talking about COVID and viruses and so on.

• 22:11George Hotz?

  Yeah.

• 22:12Lex Fridman?

  If you were tried to engineer some kind of defense mechanisms, like a vaccine against COVID or all that kind of stuff, that doing any kind of experimentation like you can with like autonomous vehicles would be very technically cost, technically and ethically costly.

• 22:30George Hotz?

  I'm not sure about that. I think you can do tons of crazy biology and test tubes. I think my bigger complaint is more, oh, the tools are so bad.

• 22:42Lex Fridman?

  Like literally, you mean like, like libraries and?

• 22:45George Hotz?

  I'm not, I'm not pipetting shit. Like you're handing me a, I gotta, no, no, no, there has to be some.

• 22:53Lex Fridman?

  Like automating stuff and like the, yeah, but human biology is messy. Like it seems.

• 22:59George Hotz?

  But like, look at those Doronos videos. They were a joke. It's like, it's like a little gantry. It's like a little X Y gantry high school science project with the pipette. I'm like, really?

• 23:09Lex Fridman?

  Gotta be something better.

• 23:10George Hotz?

  You can't build like nice microfluidics and I can program the, you know, computation to bio interface. I mean, this is gonna happen. But like right now, if you are asking me to pipette 50 milliliters of solution, I'm out. This is so crude.

• 23:26Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Okay. Let's get all the crazy out of the way. So a bunch of people asked me, since we talked about the simulation last time. We talked about hacking the simulation. Do you have any updates? Any insights about how we might be able to go about hacking simulation if we indeed do live in a simulation?

• 23:48George Hotz?

  I think a lot of people misinterpreted the point of that South by talk. The point of the South by talk was not literally to hack the simulation. I think that this.

• 24:01George Hotz?

  We, this is, this is an idea is literally just, I think theoretical physics. I think that's the whole, you know, the whole goal. Right? You want your grand unified theory, but then, okay, build a grand unified theory, search for exploits. Right? I think we're nowhere near actually there yet. My hope with that was just more to like. Like, are you people kidding me with the things you spend time thinking about? Do you understand like kind of how small you are? You are, you are bytes and God's computer. Really? And the things that people get worked up about and, you know?

• 24:37Lex Fridman?

  So basically it was more a message of, we should humble ourselves that we get to.

• 24:46Lex Fridman?

  Like, what are we humans in this byte code?

• 24:50George Hotz?

  Yeah, and not just humble ourselves, but like, like, I'm not trying to like, make people feel guilty or anything like that. I'm trying to say like, literally, look at what you are spending time on, right?

• 25:01Lex Fridman?

  What are you referring to? You're referring to the Kardashians? What are we talking about?

• 25:04George Hotz?

  Um, I'm referring to, no, the Kardashians. See, everyone knows that's kind of fun. I'm referring more to like, the economy, you know, this idea that we gotta up our stock price, like, or, or what is, what is the goal function of humanity?

• 25:26Lex Fridman?

  You don't like the game of capitalism? Like, you don't like the games we've constructed for ourselves as humans?

• 25:31George Hotz?

  I'm a big fan of capitalism. I don't think that's really the game we're playing right now. I think we're playing a, a different game where the rules are rigged.

• 25:41Lex Fridman?

  Okay, which games are interesting to you that we humans have constructed and which aren't, which are productive and which are not?

• 25:49George Hotz?

  Actually, maybe that's the real point of the, of the talk. It's like, stop playing these fake human games. There's a real game here. We can play the real game. The real game is, you know, nature wrote the rules. This is a real game. There still is a game to play.

• 26:06Lex Fridman?

  But if you look at, sorry to interrupt, I don't know if you've seen the Instagram account Nature is Metal, the game that nature seems to be playing is a lot, lot more cruel that we humans want to put up with, or at least we see it as cruel. It's like, the bigger thing eats the smaller thing and does it to impress another big thing so it can mate with that thing. And that's it. That seems to be the entirety of it.

• 26:35George Hotz?

  Well.

• 26:36Lex Fridman?

  There's no art, there's no music, there's no comma AI, there's no comma one, no comma two, no George Hotz with his brilliant talks at South by Southwest.

• 26:47George Hotz?

  See, I disagree, though. I disagree that this is what nature is. I think nature just provided basically a open world MMORPG. And, um, you know, here it's open world. I mean, if that's the game you want to play, you can play that game.

• 27:03Lex Fridman?

  But that, isn't that, isn't that beautiful? I don't know if you played Diablo, they used to have, I think, cow level where it's.

• 27:12Lex Fridman?

  So everybody will go just they figured out this like the best way to gain like experience points is to just slaughter cows over and over and over. And so they figured out this little sub game within the bigger game that this is the most efficient way to get experience points and everybody somehow agreed that getting experience points in RPG context where you always want to be getting more stuff, more skills, more levels, keep advancing, that seems to be good, so might as well spend, sacrifice actual enjoyment of playing a game, exploring a world and spending like hundreds of hours of your time

• 27:52Lex Fridman?

  in cow level. I mean, the number of hours I spent in cow level, I'm not like the most impressive person because people have spent probably thousands of hours there, but it's ridiculous. So that's a little absurd game that brought me joy in some weird dopamine drug kind of way.

• 28:08George Hotz?

  Yeah.

• 28:09Lex Fridman?

  So you don't like those games. You don't, you don't think that's us humans failing the

• 28:15George Hotz?

  Yeah.

• 28:16Lex Fridman?

  nature.

• 28:17George Hotz?

  I think so.

• 28:18Lex Fridman?

  And that was the point of the talk.

• 28:20George Hotz?

  Yeah.

• 28:21Lex Fridman?

  So how do we hack it then?

• 28:22George Hotz?

  Well, I want to live forever and

• 28:24Lex Fridman?

  Wait.

• 28:25George Hotz?

  I want to live forever. And this is

• 28:27Lex Fridman?

  That's the goal.

• 28:27George Hotz?

  Well, that's a game against nature.

• 28:30Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Immortality is the good objective function to you?

• 28:34George Hotz?

  I mean, start there and then you can do whatever else you want because you've got a long time.

• 28:38Lex Fridman?

  What if immortality makes the game just totally not fun? I mean, like, why do you assume immortality is somehow

• 28:46George Hotz?

  It's not.

• 28:47Lex Fridman?

  A good objective function?

• 28:49George Hotz?

  It's not immortality that I want. A true immortality where I could not die. I would prefer what we have right now. But I want to choose my own death, of course.

• 28:59George Hotz?

  I don't want nature to decide when I die. I'm going to win. I'm going to beat you.

• 29:04Lex Fridman?

  And then at some point, if you choose, commit suicide, like, how long you think you'd live?

• 29:12George Hotz?

  Until I get bored.

• 29:14Lex Fridman?

  See, I don't think people like in like brilliant people like you that really ponder living a long time are really considering how, how meaningless life becomes.

• 29:29George Hotz?

  Well, I want to know everything and then I'm ready to die.

• 29:34George Hotz?

  As long as there's-

• 29:35Lex Fridman?

  But why do you want, isn't it possible that you wanna know everything because it's finite? Like, the reason you wanna know quote-unquote "everything" is because you don't have enough time to know everything? And once you have unlimited time, then you realize, like, why do anything? Like, why learn anything?

• 29:56George Hotz?

  I wanna know everything, and then I'm ready to die.

• 29:58Lex Fridman?

  So you have, yeah, okay.

• 29:59George Hotz?

  It's not, it's not a, like, it's a terminal value. It's not, it's not in service of anything else.

• 30:05Lex Fridman?

  I'm conscious of the possibility, this is not a certainty, but the possibility is of that engine of curiosity that you're speaking to is actually a, a symptom of the finiteness of life. Like, without that finiteness, your curiosity would vanish, like, like a, like a morning fog.

• 30:27George Hotz?

  Alright, cool.

• 30:28Lex Fridman?

  Bukowski talked about love like that.

• 30:30George Hotz?

  Then, um, let me solve immortality. Let me change the thing in my brain that reminds me of the fact that I'm immortal, tells me that life is finite shit. Maybe I'll have it tell me that life ends next week, right? I'm okay with some self-manipulation like that. I'm okay with, with deceiving myself.

• 30:45Lex Fridman?

  Oh, Rika, changing, changing the code.

• 30:48George Hotz?

  Yeah, well, if that's the problem, right? If the problem is that I will no longer have that, that curiosity, I'd like to have backup copies of myself, uh, which I-

• 30:55Lex Fridman?

  Revert, yeah.

• 30:56George Hotz?

  Well, which I check in with occasionally to make sure they're okay with the trajectory and they can kind of override it. Maybe a nice, like, I think of like those wave nets, those like logarithmic, go back to the copies.

• 31:06Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but sometimes it's not reversible. Like, uh-

• 31:08George Hotz?

  Sure.

• 31:08Lex Fridman?

  I've done this with video games. When, once you figure out the cheat code, or like, you look up how to cheat old school, like, single player, it ruins the game for you.

• 31:17George Hotz?

  Absolutely. I know that feeling, but again, that just means our brain manipulation technology's not good enough yet. Remove that cheat code from your brain. Here you go.

• 31:25Lex Fridman?

  What if we, so it's also possible that if we figure out immortality, that all of us will kill ourselves before we advance far enough to, uh, to be able to revert the change.

• 31:39George Hotz?

  I'm not killing myself till I know everything, so.

• 31:42Lex Fridman?

  That's what you say now, because your life is finite.

• 31:46George Hotz?

  You know, I think, yes, self-modifying systems gets, comes up with all these hairy complexities and-

• 31:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 31:52George Hotz?

  Can I promise that I'll do it perfectly? No, but I think I can put good safety structures in place.

• 31:58Lex Fridman?

  So that talk and your thinking here is not literally-

• 32:03Lex Fridman?

  Referring to a simulation in that our our universe is a kind of computer program running on a computer. It's more of a thought experiment.

• 32:15George Hotz?

  Um.

• 32:16Lex Fridman?

  Do you also think of the potential of the sort of Bostrom, Elon Musk, and others that talk about an actual program that simulates our universe?

• 32:30George Hotz?

  Oh, I don't doubt that we're in a simulation. I just think that it's not quite that important. I mean, I'm interested only in simulation theory as far as like it gives me power over nature. If it's totally unfalsifiable, then who cares?

• 32:44Lex Fridman?

  I mean, what do you think that experiment would look like? Like, somebody on Twitter asked, ask George what signs we would look for to know whether or not we're in simulation, which is exactly what you're asking is like the step that precedes the step of knowing how to get more power from this knowledge is to get an indication that there's some power to be gained. So get an indication that there you can discover and exploit cracks in the simulation. Or it doesn't have to be, you know, in the physics of the universe.

• 33:16George Hotz?

  Yeah. Show me. I mean, like a memory leak could be cool. Like some scrying technology, you know?

• 33:24Lex Fridman?

  What, what kind of technology?

• 33:26George Hotz?

  Scrying?

• 33:27Lex Fridman?

  What's that?

• 33:27George Hotz?

  Oh, that's a weird. Scrying is the is the paranormal ability to like, like remote viewing, like being able to see somewhere where you're not. So, you know, I don't think you can do it by chanting in a room. But if we could find, there's a memory leak, basically.

• 33:47Lex Fridman?

  It's a memory leak. Yeah, you're able to access parts you're not supposed to.

• 33:50George Hotz?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 33:51Lex Fridman?

  And thereby discover shortcut.

• 33:53George Hotz?

  Yeah, maybe I mean, memory leak means the other thing as well. But I mean, like, yeah, like an ability to read arbitrary memory. Right? And that one's not that horrifying. The the right ones start to be horrifying.

• 34:02Lex Fridman?

  Read it right. So this, the reading is not the problem.

• 34:05George Hotz?

  Yeah, it's like Heartbleed for the universe.

• 34:08Lex Fridman?

  Oh, boy, the writing is a big, big problem. It's a big problem. It's the moment you can write anything, even if it's just random noise. That's terrifying.

• 34:20George Hotz?

  I mean, even without, even without that, like even some of the, you know, the nanotech stuff that's coming, I think is.

• 34:28Lex Fridman?

  I don't know if you're paying attention, but actually Eric Weinstein came out with the theory of everything. I mean, that came out. He's been working on a theory of everything in the physics world called geometric unity. And then for me, from computer science person like you, Stephen Wolfram's theory of everything of like hypographs is super interesting and beautiful, but that not from a physics perspective, but from a computational perspective. I don't know. Have you paid attention to any of that?

• 34:53George Hotz?

  So again, like what would make me pay attention and like why like I hate string theory is, okay, make a testable prediction, right? I'm only interested in, I'm not interested in theories for their intrinsic beauty. I'm interested in theories that give me power over the universe. So if these theories do, I'm very interested.

• 35:14Lex Fridman?

  Can I just say how beautiful that is? Because a lot of physicists say, I'm interested in experimental validation. And they skip out the part where they say to give me more power in the universe. I just love the

• 35:28George Hotz?

  Yo, I want, I want, I want

• 35:29Lex Fridman?

  The clarity of that.

• 35:30George Hotz?

  I want 100 gigahertz processors. I want transistors that are smaller than atoms. I want like power.

• 35:39Lex Fridman?

  That's, that's true. And that's where people from aliens to this kind of technology where people are worried that governments, like who owns that power? Is it George Hart's? Is it thousands of distributed hackers across the world? Is it governments? You know, is it Mark Zuckerberg? There's a lot of people that I don't know if anyone trusts any one individual with power. So they're always worried.

• 36:08George Hotz?

  It's the beauty of blockchains.

• 36:10Lex Fridman?

  That's the beauty of blockchains, which we'll talk about. On Twitter, somebody pointed me to a story, a bunch of people pointed me to a story a few months ago where you went into a restaurant in New York, and you can correct me if any of this is wrong, and ran into a bunch of folks from a company in a crypto company who are trying to scale up Ethereum. And they had a technical deadline related to a solidity to OVM compiler. So these are all Ethereum technologies. So you stepped in, they recognized you, pulled you aside, explained their problem, and you stepped in and helped them solve the problem, thereby creating legend status story.

• 36:55Lex Fridman?

  Can you tell me the story in a little more detail? It seems kind of incredible. Did this happen?

• 37:03George Hotz?

  Yeah, yeah, it's a true story. It's a true story. I mean, they wrote a very flattering account of it.

• 37:09George Hotz?

  They, so optimism is the spinoff, the company's called Optimism, spinoff of Plasma. They're trying to build L2 solutions on Ethereum. So right now, every Ethereum node has to run every transaction on the Ethereum network. And this kind of doesn't scale, right? Because if you have N computers, well, you know, if that becomes 2N computers, you actually still get the same amount of compute, right? This is, this is like O of 1 scaling, because they all have to run it. Okay, fine, you get more blockchain security, but like blockchain's already so secure. Can we trade some of that off for speed? So that's kind of what these L2 solutions are.

• 37:51George Hotz?

  They built this thing which kind of, kind of sandbox for Ethereum contracts, so they can run it in this L2 world and it can't do certain things in L world, in L1.

• 38:01Lex Fridman?

  Can I ask you for some definitions? What's L2?

• 38:04George Hotz?

  Oh, L2 is layer 2. So L1 is like the base Ethereum chain, and then layer 2 is like a computational layer that runs elsewhere, but still is kind of secured by layer 1.

• 38:18Lex Fridman?

  And I'm sure a lot of people know, but Ethereum is a cryptocurrency, probably one of the most popular cryptocurrencies, second to Bitcoin, and a lot of interesting technological innovations there. Maybe you could also slip in, whenever you talk about this, any things that are exciting to you in the Ethereum space? And why Ethereum?

• 38:38George Hotz?

  Well, I mean, Bitcoin is not Turing complete.

• 38:43George Hotz?

  Ethereum is not technically Turing complete with the gas limit, but close enough.

• 38:47Lex Fridman?

  With the gas limit? What's the gas limit? Resources?

• 38:50George Hotz?

  Yeah, I mean, no computer is actually Turing complete.

• 38:52Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 38:54George Hotz?

  You can find out RAM, you know, I can actually solve the whole problem.

• 38:57Lex Fridman?

  What's the word gas limit? You have so many brilliant words. I'm not even gonna ask.

• 39:00George Hotz?

  Well, that's what that's. No, no, that's not my word. That's Ethereum's word.

• 39:03Lex Fridman?

  Gas.

• 39:03George Hotz?

  Ethereum, you have to spend gas per instruction. So like different op codes use different amounts of gas and you buy gas with Ether to prevent people from basically DDoSing the network.

• 39:13Lex Fridman?

  So Bitcoin is proof of work. And then what's Ethereum?

• 39:18George Hotz?

  It's also proof of work. They're working on some proof of stake Ethereum 2.0 stuff. But right now it's it's proof of work. It uses a different hash function from Bitcoin. That's more ASIC resistance because you need RAM.

• 39:28Lex Fridman?

  So we're all talking about Ethereum 1.0. So what what were they trying to do to scale this whole process?

• 39:34George Hotz?

  So they were like, well, if we could run contracts elsewhere and then only save the results of that computation, you know, well, we don't actually have to do the compute on the chain. We can do the compute off chain and just post what the results are. Now, the problem with that is, well, somebody could lie about what the results are. So you need a resolution mechanism and the resolution mechanism can be really expensive. Because, you know, you just have to make sure that like the person who is saying, look, I swear that this is the real computation. I'm staking $10,000 on that fact. And if you prove it wrong, yeah, it might cost you $3,000 in gas fees to prove wrong, but you'll get the $10,000 bounty. So you can secure using those kinds of systems.

• 40:19George Hotz?

  So it's effectively a sandbox which runs contracts and like just like any kind of normal sandbox, you have to like replace syscalls with, you know, calls into the hypervisor.

• 40:33Lex Fridman?

  Sandbox, syscalls, hypervisor. What do these things mean? As long as it's interesting to talk about.

• 40:40George Hotz?

  Yeah, I mean, you can take like the Chrome sandbox is maybe the one to think about, right? So the Chrome process that's doing a rendering can't, for example, read a file from the file system.

• 40:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 40:49George Hotz?

  It has, if it tries to make an open syscall in Linux, the open syscall, you can't make it open syscall. No, no, no. You have to request from the kind of hypervisor process or like, I don't know what it's called in Chrome, but.

• 41:04George Hotz?

  The, hey, could you open this file for me? And then it does all these checks and then it passes the file handle back in if it's approved.

• 41:11Lex Fridman?

  Got it.

• 41:12George Hotz?

  So that's, yeah.

• 41:13Lex Fridman?

  So what's the, in the context of Ethereum, what are the boundaries of the sandbox that we're talking about?

• 41:19George Hotz?

  Well, like, one of the calls that you, actually reading and writing any state to the Ethereum contract, or to the Ethereum blockchain.

• 41:29George Hotz?

  Writing state is one of those calls that you're going to have to sandbox in Layer 2. Because if you let Layer 2 just arbitrarily write to the Ethereum blockchain.

• 41:41Lex Fridman?

  So Layer 2 is really sitting on top of Layer 1. So you're gonna have a lot of different kinds of ideas that you can play with.

• 41:49George Hotz?

  Yeah.

• 41:49Lex Fridman?

  And they're all, they're not fundamentally changing the source code level of Ethereum.

• 41:56George Hotz?

  Well, you have to replace a bunch of calls with calls into the hypervisor. So instead of doing the sys call directly, you replace it with a call to the hypervisor. So originally, they were doing this by first running the, so Solidity is the language that most Ethereum contracts are written in. It compiles to a bytecode. And then they wrote this thing they called the transpiler. And the transpiler took the bytecode and it transpiled it into OVM safe bytecode. Basically bytecode that didn't make any of those restricted sys calls and added the calls to the hypervisor. This transpiler was a 3,000-line mess. And it's hard to do.

• 42:38George Hotz?

  It's hard to do if you're trying to do it like that, because you have to kind of like deconstruct the bytecode, change things about it, and then reconstruct it. And, I mean, as soon as I hear this, I'm like, well, why don't you just change the compiler? Right? Why not the first place you build the bytecode, just do it in the compiler?

• 42:56George Hotz?

  So, yeah, you know, I asked them how much they wanted it.

• 43:00George Hotz?

  Of course, measured in dollars, and I'm like, well, okay. And, yeah.

• 43:05Lex Fridman?

  And you wrote the compiler?

• 43:06George Hotz?

  Yeah, I modified, I wrote a 300-line diff to the compiler. It's open source, you can look at it.

• 43:11Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's, yeah, I looked at the code last night. That's, it's.

• 43:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, exactly. Cute is, cute is a good word for it. It's, and it's C++.

• 43:22George Hotz?

  C++.

• 43:25Lex Fridman?

  So when asked how you were able to do it, you said, you just gotta think and then do it right.

• 43:34Lex Fridman?

  So can you break that apart a little bit? What's, what's your process of, uh, one, thinking and two, doing it right?

• 43:40George Hotz?

  You know, they, they, they, the people I was working for are amused that I said that. It doesn't really mean anything.

• 43:45Lex Fridman?

  Okay. I mean, is, is there some deep, profound insights to draw from like how you problem solve from that?

• 43:54George Hotz?

  This is always what I say. I'm like, do you want to be a good programmer? Do it for 20 years.

• 43:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, there's no shortcuts.

• 44:00George Hotz?

  No.

• 44:02Lex Fridman?

  What are your thoughts on crypto in general? So what, what, what parts technically or philosophy do you find especially beautiful, maybe?

• 44:10George Hotz?

  Oh, I'm, I'm extremely bullish on crypto long-term. Not any specific crypto project, but this idea of, well, two ideas. The one, um, the Nakamoto consensus algorithm is, I think, one of the greatest innovations of the 21st century. This idea that people can reach consensus, you can reach a group consensus using a relatively straightforward algorithm.

• 44:38George Hotz?

  Is wild and like, I mean, Satoshi Nakamoto, people always ask me who I look up to. It's like, whoever that is.

• 44:48Lex Fridman?

  Who do you think it is?

• 44:50George Hotz?

  I mean,

• 44:50Lex Fridman?

  Elon Musk? Is it you?

• 44:53George Hotz?

  It is definitely not me and I do not think it's Elon Musk. But yeah, this idea of our groups reaching consensus in a decentralized, yet formulaic way, is one extremely powerful idea from crypto.

• 45:11George Hotz?

  Maybe the second idea is this idea of smart contracts. When you write a contract, Between two parties, any contract. This contract, if there are disputes, it's interpreted by lawyers. Lawyers are just really shitty, overpaid interpreters. Imagine you had, let's talk about them in terms of A, in terms of like, let's compare a lawyer to Python. Right? So lawyer, well, okay.

• 45:38Lex Fridman?

  That's brilliant. Oh, I never thought of it that way. It's hilarious.

• 45:42George Hotz?

  So, so Python, I'm paying, I'm paying, you know, even 10 cents an hour. I'll use the nice Azure machine. I can run Python for 10 cents an hour. Lawyers cost $1,000 an hour. So Python is 10,000x better on that axis. Lawyers don't always return the same answer. Python almost always does.

• 46:07Lex Fridman?

  Cost.

• 46:08George Hotz?

  Yeah, I mean, just, just, just cost, reliability, everything about Python is so much better than lawyers. So if you can make smart contracts, this whole concept of code is law. I, I love, and I would love to live in a world where everybody accepted that fact.

• 46:26Lex Fridman?

  So, so maybe you can talk about what smart contracts are?

• 46:32George Hotz?

  So let's say, um, let's say, you know, we have a, uh, even something as simple as a safety deposit box, right? Safety deposit box that holds a million dollars. I have a contract with the bank that says two out of these three parties must be present to open the safety deposit box and get the money out. So that's a contract with the bank and it's only as good as the bank and the lawyers, right? Let's say, you know, somebody dies and now we're going to go through a big legal dispute about whether, oh, well, was it in the will? Was it not in the will? What, what, like, it's just so messy and the cost to determine truth is so expensive.

• 47:15George Hotz?

  Versus a smart contract, which just uses cryptography to check if two out of three keys are present. Well, I can look at that and I can have certainty in the answer that it's going to return. And that's what all businesses want is certainty. You know, they say businesses don't care. Viacom, YouTube, YouTube's like, look, we don't care which way this lawsuit goes. Just please tell us so we can have certainty.

• 47:38Lex Fridman?

  I wonder how many agreements in this, because we're talking about financial transactions only in this case, correct? The smart contracts.

• 47:46George Hotz?

  Oh, you can go to, you can go to anything. You can go, you can put a prenup in the Ethereum blockchain.

• 47:52Lex Fridman?

  Married smart contract?

• 47:53George Hotz?

  Sorry divorce lawyer, sorry. You're going to be replaced by Python.

• 47:59Lex Fridman?

  Okay, so that's, so that's, that's another beautiful idea. Do you think there's something that's appealing to you about any one specific implementation? So if you look 10, 20, 50 years down the line, do you see any like Bitcoin, Ethereum, any of the other hundreds of cryptocurrency's winning out? Is there, like, what's your intuition about the space? Are you just sitting back and watching the chaos and look who cares what emerges?

• 48:28George Hotz?

  Oh, I don't, I don't speculate. I don't really care. I don't really care which one of these projects wins. I'm kind of in the Bitcoin as a meme coin camp. I mean, why does Bitcoin have value? It's technically kind of, you know,

• 48:41Lex Fridman?

  What?

• 48:42George Hotz?

  Not great, like the block size debate. Or when I found out what the block size debate was, I'm like, are you guys kidding?

• 48:48Lex Fridman?

  What's the block size debate?

• 48:52George Hotz?

  You know what? It's really, it's too stupid to even talk to. People, people, people can look it up, but I'm like, wow. You know, Ethereum seems, the governance of Ethereum seems much better. I've come around a bit on proof of stake ideas. You know, very smart people thinking about some things.

• 49:08Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, you know, governance is interesting. It does feel like Vitalik, like it does feel like in open, even in these distributed systems, leaders are helpful.

• 49:22Lex Fridman?

  Because they kind of help you drive the mission and the vision and they put a face to a project. It's a weird thing about us humans.

• 49:31George Hotz?

  Geniuses are helpful, like the talent.

• 49:33Lex Fridman?

  Right, yeah.

• 49:37George Hotz?

  Leaders.

• 49:38Lex Fridman?

  Are not necessary, yeah. So you think the reason he's a, he's the face of Ethereum is because he's a genius? That's interesting. I mean, that was, um.

• 49:52Lex Fridman?

  It's interesting to think about that we need to create systems in which, uh, the quote unquote leaders that emerge are the geniuses in the system.

• 50:04Lex Fridman?

  I mean, that's arguably why the current state of democracy is broken is the people who are emerging as the leaders are not the most competent, are not the superstars of the system. And it seems like, at least for now, in the crypto world, oftentimes the leaders are the superstars.

• 50:20George Hotz?

  Imagine at the debate, they asked, what's the Sixth Amendment? What are the four fundamental forces in the universe?

• 50:26Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 50:27George Hotz?

  What's the integral of two to the X?

• 50:29Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 50:30George Hotz?

  I'd love to see those questions asked and that's what I want as our leader.

• 50:34Lex Fridman?

  It's a little bit.

• 50:35George Hotz?

  What's Bayes' rule?

• 50:38Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I mean, even, oh, wow, you're hurting my brain. It's, it's, that. My standard was even lower, but I would have loved to see just this basic brilliance. Like I've talked to historians, there's just these, they're not even like, they don't have a PhD or even education history. They just, uh, like a Dan Carlin type character who just like, holy shit, how did all this information get into your head? They're able to just connect Genghis Khan to the entirety of the history of the 20th century. They, they know everything about every single battle that happened.

• 51:16George Hotz?

  Yeah.

• 51:17Lex Fridman?

  And they know the, the, the, like, the Game of Thrones of the, of the different power plays and all that happened there. And they know like the individuals and all the documents involved. And it's, and they integrate that into their regular life. It's not like they're ultra history nerds. They're just, they know this information. That's what competence looks like.

• 51:38George Hotz?

  Yeah.

• 51:39Lex Fridman?

  Because I've seen that with programmers too, right? That's what great programmers do. But yeah, it would be, it's really unfortunate that those kinds of people aren't emerging as as our leaders. But for now, at least, in the crypto world, that seems to be the case. I don't know if that always, you could imagine that in a hundred years, it's not the case, right?

• 51:59George Hotz?

  The crypto world has one very powerful idea going for it, and that's the idea of forks. Right? I mean, you know, imagine, we'll use a less controversial example. This was actually in my joke app in 2012. I was like, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, let's let them both be president, right? Like, imagine we could fork America and just let them both be president. And then the Americas could compete and, you know, people could invest in one, pull their liquidity out of one, put it in the other. You have this in the crypto world. Ethereum forks into Ethereum and Ethereum Classic. And you can pull your liquidity out of one and put it in another.

• 52:39George Hotz?

  And people vote with their dollars, which forks, companies should be able to fork. I'd love to fork Nvidia, you know?

• 52:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, like different business strategies.

• 52:53George Hotz?

  Yeah.

• 52:54Lex Fridman?

  And then try them out and see, see what works. Like even take, yeah, take Com AI that closes its source and then take one that's open source and see what works. Take one that's purchased by GM and one that remains Android Renegade and all these different versions and see.

• 53:16George Hotz?

  The beauty of Com AI is someone can actually do that.

• 53:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 53:18George Hotz?

  Please take Com AI and fork it.

• 53:20Lex Fridman?

  That's right. That's the beauty of open source. So you're, I mean, we'll, we'll talk about autonomous vehicle space, but it does seem that you're.

• 53:32Lex Fridman?

  Really knowledgeable about a lot of different topics. So the natural question, a bunch of people ask this, which is, how do you keep learning new things? Do you have like practical advice? If you were to introspect, like taking notes, allocate time? Or do you just mess around and just allow your curiosity to drive?

• 53:52George Hotz?

  I'll write these people a self-help book and I'll charge $67 for it.

• 53:57George Hotz?

  And I will, I will write.

• 53:58Lex Fridman?

  What's chapter one?

• 53:59George Hotz?

  I will write on the cover of the self-help book, all this advice is completely meaningless. You're gonna be a sucker and buy this book anyway. And the one lesson that I hope they take away from the book is that I can't give you a meaningful answer to that.

• 54:13Lex Fridman?

  That's interesting. Let me translate that. Is you haven't really thought about what it is you do systematically. Because you could reduce it and there's some people, I mean, I've met brilliant people that, I mean, this is really clear with athletes. Some are just, you know, the best in the world at something. And they, they have zero interest in writing a self-help book or how to master this game. And then there's some athletes who become great coaches and they love the analysis, perhaps the over analysis. And you right now, at least at your age, which is an interesting, you're in the middle of the battle. You're like the warriors that have zero interest in writing books.

• 54:58Lex Fridman?

  So you're in the middle of the battle. So you have, yeah.

• 55:01George Hotz?

  This is, this is a fair point. I do think I have a certain aversion to this kind of deliberate, intentional way of living life.

• 55:11Lex Fridman?

  You're eventually, the hilarity of this, especially since this is recorded,

• 55:18Lex Fridman?

  it will reveal beautifully the absurdity when you finally do publish this book. I guarantee you, you will. The story of comma AI would be, maybe it'll be a biography written about you. That'll be, that'll be better, I guess.

• 55:31George Hotz?

  And you might be able to learn some cute lessons if you're starting a company like comma AI from that book. But if you're asking generic questions, like, how do I be good at things? Dude, I don't know.

• 55:42Lex Fridman?

  Well, learn, I mean, the interesting.

• 55:44George Hotz?

  Do them a lot.

• 55:45Lex Fridman?

  Do them a lot, but the interesting thing here is learning things outside of your current trajectory, which is what it feels like from an outsider's perspective. I mean, that.

• 55:57Lex Fridman?

  You know, that, I don't know if there's advice on that, but it is an interesting curiosity. When you become really busy, you're running a company.

• 56:08George Hotz?

  Hard time.

• 56:11Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. But like, there's a natural inclination and trend, like, just the momentum of life carries you into a particular direction of wanting to focus. And this kind of dispersion that curiosity can lead to gets harder and harder with time. Because you get really good at certain things. And it sucks trying things that you're not good at, like trying to figure them out. You do this with your live streams. You're on the fly figuring stuff out. You don't mind looking dumb.

• 56:42George Hotz?

  No.

• 56:45Lex Fridman?

  You just figure it out, figure it out pretty quickly.

• 56:47George Hotz?

  Sometimes I try things and I don't figure them out. My chess rating is like a 1400 despite putting like a couple hundred hours in. It's pathetic. I mean, to be fair, I know that I could do it better. If I did it better, like, don't play, you know, don't play five-minute games, play 15-minute games at least. Like, I know these things, but it just doesn't, it doesn't stick nicely in my knowledge tree.

• 57:08Lex Fridman?

  All right, let's talk about Kama AI. What's the mission of the company? Let's like, look at the biggest picture.

• 57:15George Hotz?

  Oh, I have an exact statement. Solve self-driving cars while delivering shippable intermediaries.

• 57:22Lex Fridman?

  So, long-term vision is have fully autonomous vehicles and make sure you're making money along the way.

• 57:30George Hotz?

  I think that doesn't really speak to money, but I can talk, I can talk about what solve self-driving cars means. Solve self-driving cars, of course, means you're not building a new car, you're building a person replacement. That person can sit in the driver's seat and drive you anywhere a person can drive with a human or better level of safety, speed, quality, comfort.

• 57:52Lex Fridman?

  And what's the second part of that?

• 57:54George Hotz?

  Delivering shippable intermediaries is, well, it's a way to fund the company. That's true, but it's also a way to keep us honest.

• 58:02George Hotz?

  If you don't have that, it is very easy with this technology to think you're making progress when you're not. I've heard it best described on Hacker News as you can set any arbitrary milestone, meet that milestone and still be infinitely far away from solving self-driving cars.

• 58:22Lex Fridman?

  So it's hard to have like real deadlines when you're like Cruise or Waymo when you don't have revenue.

• 58:33Lex Fridman?

  Is that, I mean, is revenue essentially the thing we're talking about here?

• 58:38George Hotz?

  Revenue is, capitalism is based around consent. Capitalism, the way that you get revenue is a kind of real capitalism, commas in the real capitalism camp. There's definitely scams out there, but real capitalism is based around consent. It's based around this idea that like, if we're getting revenue, it's because we're providing at least that much value to another person. When someone buys $1,000 comma two from us, we're providing them at least $1,000 of value or they wouldn't buy it.

• 59:01Lex Fridman?

  Brilliant. So can you give a whirlwind overview of the products that Kama AI provides, like throughout its history and today?

• 59:09George Hotz?

  I mean, yeah, the past ones aren't really that interesting. It's kind of just been refinement of the same idea.

• 59:16George Hotz?

  The real only product we sell today is the Comma two.

• 59:19Lex Fridman?

  Which is a piece of hardware with cameras.

• 59:23George Hotz?

  So the Comma two, I mean, you can think about it kind of like a person. You know, and future hardware will probably be even more and more person like. So it has, you know, eyes, ears, a mouth, a brain, and a way to interface with the car.

• 59:40Lex Fridman?

  Does it have consciousness? Just kidding. That was a trick question.

• 59:44George Hotz?

  I don't have consciousness either. Me and the Comma two are the same.

• 59:47Lex Fridman?

  You're the same?

• 59:48George Hotz?

  I have a little more compute than it. It only has like the same compute as a

• 59:51Lex Fridman?

  Interesting.

• 59:51George Hotz?

  B, you know?

• 59:54Lex Fridman?

  You're more efficient energy wise for the compute you're doing.

• 59:57George Hotz?

  Far more efficient energy wise. 20 paid if last 20 wants, crazy.

• 1:00:01Lex Fridman?

  You lack consciousness.

• 1:00:03George Hotz?

  Sure.

• 1:00:03Lex Fridman?

  Do you fear death? You do. You want immortality.

• 1:00:06George Hotz?

  Of course I fear death.

• 1:00:06Lex Fridman?

  Does Kama AI fear death? I don't think so.

• 1:00:10George Hotz?

  Of course it does. It very much fears, well, it fears negative loss. Oh, yeah.

• 1:00:16Lex Fridman?

  Okay, so Kama, so Kama 2, when did that come out? That was a year ago? No, two?

• 1:00:22George Hotz?

  Uh, early this year.

• 1:00:24Lex Fridman?

  Wow, time, it feels like, yeah. Two, 2020 feels like it's taken 10 years to get to the end of it.

• 1:00:31George Hotz?

  It's a long year.

• 1:00:32Lex Fridman?

  It's a long year. So, uh, what, uh, what's the sexiest thing about Kama 2 feature wise? So, I mean, maybe you can also linger on like, what is it? Like, what's its purpose? Cause there's a hardware, there's a software component. You've mentioned the sensors, but also like, what are its features and capabilities?

• 1:00:54George Hotz?

  I think our slogan summarizes it well. Kama slogan is make driving chill.

• 1:00:59Lex Fridman?

  I love it. Okay.

• 1:01:01George Hotz?

  Yeah, I mean, it is, you know, if you like cruise control, imagine cruise control, but much, much more.

• 1:01:08Lex Fridman?

  So it can, uh, do adaptive cruise control things, which is like slow down for cars in front of it, maintain a certain speed, and it can also do lane keeping, so stay in the lane, and do it better and better and better over time. It's very much machine learning based.

• 1:01:24Lex Fridman?

  So there's cameras, there's a driver facing camera too? That's the, um, what else is there? What am I thinking? So the hardware versus software, so open pilot versus the actual hardware of the device. What's, can you draw that distinction? What's one, what's the other?

• 1:01:42George Hotz?

  I mean, the hardware is pretty much a cell phone with a few additions. A cell phone with a cooling system and with a car interface connecting to it.

• 1:01:51Lex Fridman?

  And by cell phone, you mean like Qualcomm Snapdragon?

• 1:01:56George Hotz?

  Uh, yeah, the current hardware is a Snapdragon 821. Uh, it has Wi-Fi radio, it has an LTE radio, it has a screen. We use every part of the cell phone.

• 1:02:06Lex Fridman?

  And then the interface with the car is specific to the car. So you keep supporting more and more cars.

• 1:02:12George Hotz?

  Um, yeah, so the interface to the car, I mean, the device itself just has four CAN buses. It has four CAN interfaces on it that are connected through the USB port to the phone. Um, and then, yeah, on those four CAN buses, uh, you connect it to the car and there's a little harness to do this. Cars are actually surprisingly similar.

• 1:02:29Lex Fridman?

  So CAN is the, the protocol by which cars communicate?

• 1:02:32George Hotz?

  Hmm.

• 1:02:32Lex Fridman?

  And then you're able to read stuff and write stuff to be able to control the car depending on the car. So what's the software side? What's OpenPilot?

• 1:02:40George Hotz?

  Um, so I mean, OpenPilot is, the hardware is pretty simple compared to OpenPilot. OpenPilot is, uh,

• 1:02:49George Hotz?

  well, so you have a machine learning model, which it's in OpenPilot. It's a, you know, it's a blob. Uh, it's just blob of weights. It's not like people are like, oh, it's closed source. I'm like, it's a blob of weights. What do you expect? You know?

• 1:03:02Lex Fridman?

  So it's primarily neural network based?

• 1:03:04George Hotz?

  You will. OpenPilot is all the software kind of around that neural network. That if you have a neural network that says, here's where you want to send the car, OpenPilot actually goes and executes all of that.

• 1:03:15Lex Fridman?

  It cleans up the input to the neural network. It cleans up the output and executes on it. So connects, it's the glue that connects everything together.

• 1:03:22George Hotz?

  Runs the sensors, does a bunch of calibration for the neural network, does, you know, deals with like, you know, if the car is on a banked road, uh, you have to counter steer against that. And the neural network can't necessarily know that by looking at the picture.

• 1:03:37George Hotz?

  So you do that with, with other sensors, infusion and localizer. Uh, OpenPilot also is responsible for, um, sending the data up to our servers, uh, so we can learn from it. Uh, logging it, recording it, running the cameras, thermally managing the device, managing the disk space on the device, managing all the resources on the device.

• 1:03:55Lex Fridman?

  So what, um, since we last spoke, I don't remember when, maybe a year ago, maybe a little bit longer. What, how, uh, has OpenPilot improved?

• 1:04:04George Hotz?

  We did exactly what I promised you. I promised you that by the end of the year, we, you'd be able to remove the lanes. The lateral policy is now almost completely end to end. You can turn the lanes off and it will drive, drive slightly worse on the highway if you turn the lanes off, but you can turn the lanes off and it will drive well trained completely end to end on user data. And this year, we hope to do the same for the longitudinal policy.

• 1:04:30Lex Fridman?

  So that's the interesting thing is you're not doing, you don't appear to be, you can correct me, you don't appear to be doing lane detection or lane marking detection or kind of the segmentation task or any kind of object detection task. You're doing what's traditionally more called like end to end learning. So, and trained on actual behavior of drivers when they're driving the car manually.

• 1:04:56George Hotz?

  And this is hard to do. You know, it's not supervised learning.

• 1:05:02Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but so the nice thing is there's a lot of data, so it's hard and easy, right? It's

• 1:05:08George Hotz?

  We have a lot of high quality data, yeah.

• 1:05:10Lex Fridman?

  Like more than you need in the sense, well.

• 1:05:13George Hotz?

  We have way more than we do. We have way more data than we need.

• 1:05:15Lex Fridman?

  I mean, it's, it's an interesting question, actually, because in terms of amount, you have more than you need. But, you know, driving is full of edge cases. So how do you select the data you train on? I think this is an interesting, open question. Like, what's, what's the cleverest way to select data? That's the question Tesla is probably working on. That's, I mean, the entirety of machine learning, they don't seem to really care. They just kind of select data. But I feel like that if you want to solve, if you want to create intelligent systems, you have to pick data well. Right? And so do you have any hints, ideas of how to do it well?

• 1:05:53George Hotz?

  So in some ways, that is the definition I like of reinforcement learning versus supervised learning. In supervised learning, the weights depend on the data. Right? And this is obviously true, but the, in reinforcement learning, the data depends on the weights.

• 1:06:11Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:12George Hotz?

  And actually, both ways.

• 1:06:13Lex Fridman?

  That's, that's poetry. That's brilliant.

• 1:06:15George Hotz?

  So how does it know what data to train on? Well, let it pick. We're not there yet, but that's the eventual.

• 1:06:20Lex Fridman?

  So you're thinking this almost like a reinforcement learning framework?

• 1:06:23George Hotz?

  We're going to do RL on the world. Every time a car makes a mistake, user disengages, we train on that and do RL on the world. Ship out a new model, that's an epoch, right?

• 1:06:34Lex Fridman?

  And for now, you're not doing the Elon-style promising that it's going to be fully autonomous. You really are sticking to level two. And like, it's supposed to be supervised.

• 1:06:45George Hotz?

  Oh, it is definitely supposed to be supervised, and we enforce the fact that it's supervised. We look at our rate of improvement in disengagements. OpenPilot now has an unplanned disengagement about every 100 miles. This is up from 10 miles, like, maybe, maybe, uh, maybe a year ago. Yeah, so maybe we've seen 10x improvement in a year, but 100 miles is still a far cry from the 100,000 you're going to need. So you're going to somehow need to get three more 10xs in there.

• 1:07:20Lex Fridman?

  And you're, what's your intuition? You're basically hoping that there's exponential improvement built into the, baked into the cake somewhere?

• 1:07:27George Hotz?

  Well, that's even, I mean, 10x improvement, that's already assuming exponential, right? There's definitely exponential improvement. And I think when Elon talks about exponential, like, these things, these systems are going to exponentially improve. Just exponential doesn't mean you're getting 100 gigahertz processors tomorrow, right? Like, it's going to still take a while because the gap between even our best system and humans is still large.

• 1:07:51Lex Fridman?

  So that's an interesting distinction to draw. So if you look at the way Tesla's approaching the problem, and the way you're approaching the problem, which is very different than the rest of the self-driving car world, so let's put them aside, is you're treating most, the driving task is a machine learning problem. And the way Tesla's approaching it is with the multitask learning, where you break the task of driving into hundreds of different tasks, and you have this multi-headed neural network that's very good at performing each task. And there, there's presumably something on top that's stitching stuff together in order to make control decisions, policy decisions about how you move the car.

• 1:08:33Lex Fridman?

  But what that allows you, there's a brilliance to this because it allows you to master each task, like lane detection, stop sign detection, traffic light detection, drivable area segmentation.

• 1:08:49Lex Fridman?

  You know, vehicle, bicycle, pedestrian detection. There's some localization tasks in there. Also predicting, like, yeah, predicting how the entities in the scene are going to move. Like, everything is basically a machine learning task. Well, there's the classification, segmentation, prediction. And it's nice because you can have this entire engine, data engine, that's mining for edge cases for each one of these tasks. And you could have people like engineers that are basically masters of that task. They become the best person in the world at, as you talk about the cone guy for Waymo.

• 1:09:30George Hotz?

  Yeah, the good old cone guy.

• 1:09:31Lex Fridman?

  The, become the best person in the world at cone detection. So that's a compelling notion from a supervised learning perspective. Automating much of the process of edge case discovery and retraining neural network for each of the individual perception tasks. And then you're looking at the machine learning in a more holistic way. Basically doing end-to-end learning on the driving task supervised, trained on the data of the actual driving of people they use, comma, AI. Like, actual human drivers doing manual control, plus the moments of disengagement that maybe

• 1:10:14Lex Fridman?

  with some labeling could indicate the failure of the system. So you have the, you have a huge amount of data for positive control of the vehicle, like, successful control of the vehicle, both maintaining the lane, as I think you're also working on longitudinal control of the vehicle. And then failure cases where the vehicle does something wrong that needs disengagement. So like, what, why do you think you're right and Tesla is wrong on this? And do you think, do you think you'll come around the Tesla way? Do you think Tesla will come around to your way?

• 1:10:51George Hotz?

  If you were to start a chess engine company, would you hire a bishop guy?

• 1:10:56Lex Fridman?

  See, we have, this is Monday morning quarterbacking. Is, yes, probably.

• 1:11:06Lex Fridman?

  So.

• 1:11:07George Hotz?

  Oh, oh, our rook guy. Oh, we stole the rook guy from that company. Oh, we're gonna have real good rooks.

• 1:11:11Lex Fridman?

  Well, there's not many pieces, right? You can, uh, there's not many guys and gals to hire. You just have a few that work in the bishop, a few that work in the rook.

• 1:11:23George Hotz?

  But is that not ludicrous today to think about in a world of Alpha Zero?

• 1:11:28Lex Fridman?

  But Alpha Zero is a chess game. So the fundamental question is, how hard is driving compared to chess? Because, so long term, end to end, will be the right solution. The question is, how many years away is that?

• 1:11:44George Hotz?

  End to end is gonna be the only solution for level five.

• 1:11:46Lex Fridman?

  For the only way we get there.

• 1:11:48George Hotz?

  Of course. And of course Tesla's gonna come around to my way. And if you're a rook guy out there, I'm sorry.

• 1:11:53Lex Fridman?

  The cone guy. I don't know.

• 1:11:56George Hotz?

  We're gonna specialize each task. We're gonna really understand rook placement.

• 1:12:00Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. I understand the intuition you have. I mean, that

• 1:12:06Lex Fridman?

  that is very compelling notion that we can learn the task end to end, like the same compelling notion you might have for natural language conversation. But I'm not sure.

• 1:12:18Lex Fridman?

  Because one thing you sneaked in there is the assertion that it's impossible to get to level five without this kind of approach. I don't know if that's obvious.

• 1:12:28George Hotz?

  I don't know if that's obvious either. I don't actually mean that. I think that it is much easier.

• 1:12:34Lex Fridman?

  Much easier.

• 1:12:34George Hotz?

  To get to level five with an end to end approach. I think that the other approach is doable, but the magnitude of the engineering challenge may exceed what humanity's capable of.

• 1:12:44Lex Fridman?

  So, but what do you think of the Tesla data engine approach? Which to me is an active learning task is kind of fascinating, is breaking it down into these multiple tasks and mining their data constantly for like edge cases for these different tasks.

• 1:13:01George Hotz?

  Yeah, but the tasks themselves are not being learned. This is feature engineering.

• 1:13:06Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I mean, it's it's a it's a higher abstraction level of feature engineering for the different tasks. It's task engineering in a sense.

• 1:13:15George Hotz?

  It's slightly better feature engineering, but it's still fundamentally is feature engineering. And if anything about the history of AI has taught us anything, it's that feature engineering approaches will always be replaced and lose to end to end. Now, to be fair, I cannot really make promises on timelines, but I can say that when you look at the code for Stockfish and the code for AlphaZero, one is a lot shorter than the other, a lot more elegant, required a lot less programmer hours to write.

• 1:13:43Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but there was a lot more murder of bad agents on the AlphaZero side. By murder, I mean agents that played a game and failed miserably.

• 1:14:01George Hotz?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:02Lex Fridman?

  And in simulation, that failure is less costly.

• 1:14:05George Hotz?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:06Lex Fridman?

  In in real world, it's

• 1:14:08George Hotz?

  Do you mean in practice? Like AlphaZero has lost games miserably?

• 1:14:11Lex Fridman?

  No.

• 1:14:13George Hotz?

  I haven't seen that.

• 1:14:14Lex Fridman?

  No, but I know, but the the the requirement for AlphaZero is

• 1:14:18George Hotz?

  A simulator.

• 1:14:19Lex Fridman?

  To be able to like evolution, human evolution, not human evolution, biological evolution of life on Earth, from the origin of life, has murdered trillions upon trillions of organisms on the path thus humans.

• 1:14:33George Hotz?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:34Lex Fridman?

  So the question is, can can we stitch together a human-like object without having to go through the entirety process of evolution?

• 1:14:40George Hotz?

  Well, no, but do the evolution in simulation.

• 1:14:42Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's the question. Can we simulate? So do you have a sense that it's possible to simulate some

• 1:14:47George Hotz?

  MuZero is exactly this. MuZero is is the solution to this. MuZero, I think, is going to look be looked back as the canonical paper. And I don't think deep learning is everything. I think that there's still a bunch of things missing to get there. But MuZero, I think, is going to be looked back as the kind of cornerstone paper of this whole deep learning era. And MuZero is the solution to self-driving cars. You have to make a few tweaks to it. But MuZero does effectively that. It does those rollouts and those murdering in in a learned simulator and a learned dynamics model.

• 1:15:20Lex Fridman?

  It's interesting. It doesn't get enough love.

• 1:15:22George Hotz?

  I was blown away when I I was blown away when I read that paper. I'm like, you know, okay, I've always had a comma. I'm gonna sit and I'm gonna wait for the solution to self-driving cars to come along. This year I saw it. It's MuZero.

• 1:15:36Lex Fridman?

  So.

• 1:15:37George Hotz?

  Sit back and let the winning roll in.

• 1:15:40Lex Fridman?

  So your sense, just to elaborate a little bit to link on the topic, your sense is neural networks will solve driving.

• 1:15:47George Hotz?

  Yes.

• 1:15:47Lex Fridman?

  Like, we don't need anything else.

• 1:15:49George Hotz?

  I think the same way chess was maybe the chess and maybe Google are the pinnacle of like, search algorithms and things that look kind of like a star.

• 1:15:59George Hotz?

  The pinnacle of this era is going to be self-driving cars.

• 1:16:05Lex Fridman?

  But on the path that you have to deliver products and it's possible that the path to full self-driving cars will take decades.

• 1:16:15George Hotz?

  I doubt it.

• 1:16:16Lex Fridman?

  So how long would you put on it? Like, what are we, you're chasing it, Tesla's chasing it. What are we talking about, five years, 10 years, 50 years?

• 1:16:27George Hotz?

  In the 2020s.

• 1:16:29Lex Fridman?

  In the 2020s?

• 1:16:30George Hotz?

  Yeah, the later part of the 2020s.

• 1:16:34Lex Fridman?

  With the neural network? That would be nice to see. And on the path to that, you're delivering products, which is a nice L2 system. That's what Tesla's doing, a nice L2 system.

• 1:16:44George Hotz?

  It just gets better every time. L2, the only difference between L2 and the other levels is who takes liability and I'm not a liability guy, I don't want to take liability. I'm going to level two forever.

• 1:16:53Lex Fridman?

  Now, on that little transition, I mean, how do you make the transition work? Is this where driver sensing comes in? Like, how do you make the, because you said 100 miles, like, is there some sort of human factor psychology thing where people start to over-trust the system, all those kinds of effects, once it gets better and better and better and better, they get lazier and lazier and lazier? Is that, like, how do you get that transition right?

• 1:17:23George Hotz?

  First off, our monitoring is already adaptive. Our monitoring is already seen adaptive.

• 1:17:27Lex Fridman?

  Driver monitoring, is this the camera that's looking at the driver? You have an infrared camera in the.

• 1:17:34George Hotz?

  Our policy for how we enforce the driver monitoring is seen adaptive.

• 1:17:38Lex Fridman?

  What's that mean?

• 1:17:39George Hotz?

  Well, for example, in one of the extreme cases, if you, if the car is not moving, we do not actively enforce driver monitoring.

• 1:17:49Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:17:50George Hotz?

  If you are going through a, like a 45 mile an hour road with lights and stop signs and potentially pedestrians, we enforce a very tight driver monitoring policy. If you are alone on a perfectly straight highway,

• 1:18:05George Hotz?

  and this is, it's all machine learning. None of that is hand coded. Actually, the stop is hand coded, but.

• 1:18:10Lex Fridman?

  So there's some kind of machine learning estimation of risk?

• 1:18:13George Hotz?

  Yes.

• 1:18:14Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I mean, I've always been a huge fan of that. That, that's a, it's difficult to do. Every step into that direction is a worthwhile stop to take. It might be difficult to do really well. Like us humans are able to estimate risk pretty damn well. Whatever the hell that is, that feels like one of the nice features of us humans. Cause like, we humans are really good drivers when we're really like tuned in. And we're good at estimating risk. Like, when are we supposed to be tuned in?

• 1:18:45George Hotz?

  Yeah. And, you know, people are like, oh, well, you know, why would you ever make the driver monitoring policy less aggressive? Why would you always not keep it at its most aggressive? Because then people are just going to get fatigue from it.

• 1:18:56Lex Fridman?

  Yes, when they get annoyed, you want them, you want, you want the experience to be pleasant.

• 1:19:01George Hotz?

  Obviously, I want the experience to be pleasant, but even just from a straight up safety perspective. If you alert people when they look around and they're like, why is this thing alerting me? There's nothing I could possibly hit right now. People will just learn to tune it out. People will just learn to tune it out, to put weights on the steering wheel, to do whatever to overcome it. And remember that you're always part of this adaptive system. So all I can really say about, you know, how this scales going forward is yeah, something we have to monitor for. We don't know. This is a great psychology experiment at scale. Like, we'll see.

• 1:19:34Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's fascinating.

• 1:19:34George Hotz?

  Track it. And making sure you have a good understanding of attention is a very key part of that psychology problem.

• 1:19:42Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I think you and I probably have a different, come to it differently, but to me, it's a fascinating psychology problem to explore something much deeper than just driving. It's such a nice way to explore human attention and human behavior. Which is why, again, we've probably both criticized Mr. Elon Musk on this one topic from different avenues. So both offline and online, I had little chats with Elon and

• 1:20:15Lex Fridman?

  like, I love human beings. As a computer vision problem, as an AI problem, it's fascinating. He wasn't so much interested in that problem. It's like, in order to solve driving, the whole point is you want to remove the human from the picture.

• 1:20:32Lex Fridman?

  And it seems like you can't do that quite yet. Eventually, yes, but you can't quite do that yet. So this is the moment where, and you can't yet say, I told you so to Tesla.

• 1:20:47Lex Fridman?

  But it's getting there because I don't know if you've seen this, there's some reporting that they're in fact starting to do driver monitoring.

• 1:20:54George Hotz?

  Yeah, they ship the model in chat mode.

• 1:20:57Lex Fridman?

  With, I believe, only a visible light camera. It might even be fisheye. It's like a low resolution.

• 1:21:04George Hotz?

  Low resolution, visible light. I mean, to be fair, that's what we have in the Eon as well, our last generation product. This is the one area where I can say our hardware is ahead of Tesla. The rest of our hardware, way, way behind, but our driver monitoring camera.

• 1:21:16Lex Fridman?

  So you think, I think on the Third Row Tesla podcast or somewhere else, I've heard you say that obviously eventually they're going to have driver monitoring.

• 1:21:28George Hotz?

  I think what I've said is Elon will definitely ship driver monitoring before he ships Level 5.

• 1:21:32Lex Fridman?

  Before Level 5.

• 1:21:33George Hotz?

  And I'm willing to bet 10 grand on that.

• 1:21:35Lex Fridman?

  And you bet 10 grand on that.

• 1:21:38George Hotz?

  I mean, now no one would take the bet, but before, maybe someone would have, I should have got my money.

• 1:21:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. It's an interesting bet. I think, I think you're right. I'm actually, on a human level, because he's been

• 1:21:52Lex Fridman?

  He's made the decision, like he said that driver monitoring is the wrong way to go. But like, you have to think of as a human, as a CEO, I think that's the right thing to say. When, like, sometimes you have to say things publicly that are different than what you actually believe, because when you're producing a large number of vehicles and the decision was made not to include the camera, like, what are you supposed to say?

• 1:22:20George Hotz?

  Yep.

• 1:22:20Lex Fridman?

  Like, our cars don't have the thing that I think is right to have. It's an interesting thing, but like, on the other side, as a CEO, I mean, it's something you could probably speak to as a leader, I think about me as a human, to publicly change your mind on something, how hard is that?

• 1:22:39George Hotz?

  Well.

• 1:22:39Lex Fridman?

  Especially when assholes like George Haas say, "I told you so."

• 1:22:43George Hotz?

  All I will say is I am not a leader and I am happy to change my mind. And I will-

• 1:22:48Lex Fridman?

  You think Elon will?

• 1:22:51George Hotz?

  Yeah, I do. I think he'll come up with a good way to make it psychologically okay for him.

• 1:22:58Lex Fridman?

  Well, it's such an important thing, man, especially for a first principles thinker, because he made a decision that driver monitoring is not the right way to go. And I could see that decision. And I could even make that decision. Like, I was on the fence too. Like, I'm not, driver monitoring is such an obvious, simple solution to the problem of attention. It's not obvious to me that just by putting a camera there, you solve things. You have to create an incredible, compelling experience, just like you're talking about. I don't know if it's easy to do that. It's not at all easy to do that, in fact, I think. So, as a creator of a car that's trying to create a product that people love, which

• 1:23:43Lex Fridman?

  is what Tesla tries to do, right? It's not obvious to me that, you know, as a design decision, whether adding a camera is a good idea, from a safety perspective either. Like, in the human factors community, everybody says that, like, you should obviously have driver sensing, driver monitoring, but like, that-

• 1:24:05Lex Fridman?

  That's like saying it's obvious as parents, you shouldn't let your kids go out at night. But okay. But like, they're still gonna find ways to do drugs.

• 1:24:18George Hotz?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:19Lex Fridman?

  You have to also be good parents. So like, it's much more complicated than just like, you need to have driver monitoring.

• 1:24:25George Hotz?

  I totally disagree on, okay, if you have a camera there and the camera's watching the person, but never throws an alert, they'll never think about it. Right? The driver monitoring policy that you choose to, how you choose to communicate with the user is entirely separate from the data collection perspective.

• 1:24:45Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:24:46George Hotz?

  Right? So, you know, like, there's one thing to say, like, you know, tell your teenager they can't do something. There's another thing to like, you know, gather the data.

• 1:24:58Lex Fridman?

  So you can make informed decisions. That's really interesting. But you have to make that, that's the interesting thing about cars. But even true with Kama AI, like, you don't have to manufacture the thing into the car, is you have to make a decision that anticipates the right strategy long term. So like, you have to start collecting the data and start making decisions.

• 1:25:18George Hotz?

  Started it, started it three years ago. I believe that we have the best driver monitoring solution in the world. I think that when you compare it to, Super Cruise is the only other one that I really know that shipped, and ours is better.

• 1:25:32Lex Fridman?

  What, uh, what do you like and not like about Super Cruise?

• 1:25:37George Hotz?

  Um, I mean, I had a few Super Cruise, uh, the sun would be shining through the window, would blind the camera, and it would say I wasn't paying attention when I was looking completely straight. I couldn't reset the attention with a steering wheel touch, and Super Cruise would disengage. Like, I was communicating to the car. I'm like, look, I am here, I am paying attention. Why are you really gonna force me to disengage? And it did. So it's a constant conversation with the user. And yeah, there's no way to ship a system like this Vucan OTA.

• 1:26:06Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:26:06George Hotz?

  We're shipping a new one every month. Sometimes we balance it with our users on Discord. Like, sometimes we make the driver monitoring a little more aggressive and people complain. Sometimes they don't. You know, we want it to be as aggressive as possible where people don't complain and it doesn't feel intrusive.

• 1:26:20Lex Fridman?

  So being able to update the system over the air is an essential component. I mean, that's probably, to me, you mentioned, uh, I mean, to me, that is the biggest innovation of Tesla. That it made it, people realize that over the air updates is essential.

• 1:26:37George Hotz?

  Yeah. I mean, was that not obvious from the iPhone? The iPhone was the first real product that OTA'd, I think.

• 1:26:44Lex Fridman?

  Was it actually? That's brilliant. You're right.

• 1:26:46George Hotz?

  I mean, the game consoles used to not, right? The game consoles were maybe the second thing that did.

• 1:26:49Lex Fridman?

  Well, I didn't really think about one of the amazing features of a smartphone isn't just like the touchscreen isn't the thing. It's the ability to constantly update.

• 1:27:01George Hotz?

  Yeah, gets better.

• 1:27:02Lex Fridman?

  It gets better.

• 1:27:06George Hotz?

  Love my iOS 14.

• 1:27:07Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. One thing that I probably disagree with you on on driver monitoring is you said that it's easy. Like, I mean, you tend to say stuff is easy. I'm sure the, I guess you said it's easy relative to the external perception problem there.

• 1:27:29Lex Fridman?

  Can you elaborate why you think it's easy?

• 1:27:31George Hotz?

  Feature engineering works for driver monitoring. Feature engineering does not work for the external.

• 1:27:36Lex Fridman?

  So, human faces are not, human faces and the movement of human faces and head and body is not as variable as the external environment?

• 1:27:47George Hotz?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:47Lex Fridman?

  Is your intuition?

• 1:27:48George Hotz?

  Yes, and there's another big difference as well. Your reliability of a driver monitoring system doesn't actually need to be that high. The uncertainty, if you have something that's detecting whether the human's paying attention and it only works 92% of the time, you're still getting almost all the benefit of that because the human, like, you're training the human.

• 1:28:05Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:06George Hotz?

  Right, you're dealing with a system that's really helping you out. It's a conversation. It's not like the external thing where, guess what? If you swerve into a tree, you swerve into a tree. Right? Like, you get no margin for error there.

• 1:28:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I think that's really well put. I, I, I think that's the right, exactly the place where.

• 1:28:26Lex Fridman?

  Where comparing to the external perception, the control problem, driver monitoring is easier because you don't, the bar for success is much lower. Yeah, but I, I still think like the human face is more complicated actually than the external environment. But for driving, you don't give a damn.

• 1:28:45George Hotz?

  I don't need, I don't need something, I don't need something that complicated to, to, to have to communicate the idea to the human that I want to communicate, which is yo, system might mess up here, you gotta pay attention.

• 1:28:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. See, that's, that's my love and fascination is the, the human face. And it feels like this is a nice place to create products that create an experience in the car. So like, it feels like there should be more richer experiences in the car.

• 1:29:18Lex Fridman?

  You know, like that's an opportunity for like something like Kama AI or just any kind of system like a Tesla or any of the autonomous vehicle companies. Is because software is, and there's much more sensors and so much is on our software and you're doing machine learning anyway. There's an opportunity to create totally new experiences that we're not even anticipating. You don't think so?

• 1:29:41George Hotz?

  Nah.

• 1:29:41Lex Fridman?

  You think it's a box that gets you from A to B and you want to do it chill?

• 1:29:45George Hotz?

  Yeah, I mean, I think as soon as we get to level three on highways, okay, enjoy your Candy Crush. Enjoy your Hulu, enjoy your, you know, whatever, whatever. Sure, you get this, you can look at screens basically. Versus right now, what do you have? Music and audiobooks?

• 1:29:59Lex Fridman?

  So level three is where you can kind of disengage in stretches of time.

• 1:30:05Lex Fridman?

  Well, you think level three is possible, like on the highway going for a hundred miles and you can just go to sleep?

• 1:30:11George Hotz?

  Oh, yeah. Uh, sleep. So again, I think it's really all on a spectrum. I think that being able to use your phone while you're on the highway and like this all being okay. And being aware that the car might alert you and you have five seconds to basically.

• 1:30:28Lex Fridman?

  So the five second thing is, you think is possible?

• 1:30:29George Hotz?

  Yeah, I think it is. Oh, yeah. Not, not in all scenarios. Right. Some scenarios it's not.

• 1:30:34Lex Fridman?

  It's, it's the whole risk thing that you mentioned is nice, is to be able to estimate like, how risky is this situation? That's really important to understand. One other thing you mentioned comparing Kama and autopilot is that.

• 1:30:50Lex Fridman?

  Something about the haptic feel of the way Comet controls the car when things are uncertain. Like it behaves a little bit more uncertain when things are uncertain. That's kind of an interesting point and then autopilot is much more confident always, even when it's uncertain until it runs into trouble. Yeah, that's, that's a funny thing. I actually mentioned that to Elon, I think. And then the first time we talked, he wasn't biting is like communicating uncertainty. I guess Comet doesn't really communicate uncertainty explicitly. Communicates it through haptic feel. Like what, what's the role of communicating uncertainty, do you think?

• 1:31:28George Hotz?

  Oh, we do some stuff explicitly, like we do detect the lanes when you're on the highway and we'll show you how many lanes we're using to drive with. You can look at where it thinks the lanes are. You can look at the path and yeah, we want to be better about this. We're actually hiring, want to hire some new UI people.

• 1:31:43Lex Fridman?

  UI people, you mentioned this because it's such a, it's a UI problem too, right? It's

• 1:31:48George Hotz?

  We have, we have, we have a great designer now, but you know, we need people who are just gonna like build this and debug these UIs, QT people and

• 1:31:54Lex Fridman?

  QT, is that what the UI is done with is QT?

• 1:31:57George Hotz?

  Moving the new UI is in QT.

• 1:32:00Lex Fridman?

  C++ QT?

• 1:32:02George Hotz?

  Tesla uses it too.

• 1:32:04Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:05George Hotz?

  We had some React stuff in there.

• 1:32:08Lex Fridman?

  React JS or just React? React is its own language, right?

• 1:32:12George Hotz?

  React native, React is, React is a JavaScript framework.

• 1:32:15Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:15George Hotz?

  Uh, it's all, it's all based on JavaScript, but it's, you know, I like C++.

• 1:32:22Lex Fridman?

  What do you think about Dojo with Tesla and their foray into what appears to be

• 1:32:31Lex Fridman?

  specialized hardware for our training yonets?

• 1:32:36Lex Fridman?

  I guess it's something, maybe you can correct me from my shallow looking at it. It seems like something like Google did with TPUs, but specialized for driving data.

• 1:32:46George Hotz?

  I don't think it's specialized for driving data.

• 1:32:49Lex Fridman?

  It's just legit, just TPU. They want to enter, go the Apple way. Basically, everything required in the chain is done in-house.

• 1:32:56George Hotz?

  Well, so you have a problem right now and this is

• 1:33:01George Hotz?

  One of my concerns, I really would like to see somebody deal with this. If anyone out there is doing it, I'd like to help them if I can. You basically have two options right now to train. Your options are Nvidia or Google. So, Google is not even an option. Their TPUs are only available in Google Cloud. Google has absolutely onerous Terms of Service restrictions. They may have changed it, but back in Google's Terms of Service, it said explicitly, "You are not allowed to use Google Cloud ML for training autonomous vehicles or for doing anything that competes with Google without Google's prior written permission."

• 1:33:40Lex Fridman?

  Wow, okay.

• 1:33:41George Hotz?

  I mean, Google is not a platform company. I wouldn't touch TPUs with a 10-foot pole. So, that leaves you with the monopoly.

• 1:33:50Lex Fridman?

  Nvidia?

• 1:33:50George Hotz?

  Nvidia. So, I mean...

• 1:33:53Lex Fridman?

  That you're not a fan of?

• 1:33:54George Hotz?

  Well, look, I was a huge fan of Nvidia in 2016. Jensen came sat in the car. Cool guy, when the stock was $30 a share. Nvidia's stock has skyrocketed. I witnessed a real change in who was in management over there in like 2018. And now they are, "Let's exploit, let's take every dollar we possibly can out of this ecosystem. Let's charge $10,000 for A100s because we know we got the best shit in the game. And let's charge $10,000 for an A100 when it's really not that different from a 3080, which is $699." The margins that they are making off of those high-end chips are so high

• 1:34:39George Hotz?

  that, I mean, I think they're shooting themselves in the foot, just from a business perspective. Because there's a lot of people talking like me now, who are like, "Somebody's got to take Nvidia down."

• 1:34:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:50George Hotz?

  Where they could dominate it, Nvidia could be the new Intel.

• 1:34:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, to be inside everything, essentially.

• 1:34:57Lex Fridman?

  And yet, the winners in certain spaces like autonomous driving, the winners, only the people who are like desperately falling back and trying to catch up and have a ton of money, like the big automakers are the ones interested in partnering with Nvidia.

• 1:35:14George Hotz?

  Oh, and I think a lot of those things are going to fall through. If I were Nvidia, sell chips. Sell chips at a reasonable markup.

• 1:35:23Lex Fridman?

  To everybody.

• 1:35:23George Hotz?

  To everybody.

• 1:35:24Lex Fridman?

  Without any restrictions.

• 1:35:25George Hotz?

  Without any restrictions. Intel did this. Look at Intel. They had a great long run. Nvidia is trying to turn their, they're like trying to productize their chips way too much. They're trying to extract way more value than they can sustainably. Sure, you can do it tomorrow. Is it going to up your share price? Sure, if you're one of those CEOs who's like, how much can I strip mine this company? And, you know, and that's what's weird about it, too. Like, the CEO is the founder. It's the same guy.

• 1:35:51Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:51George Hotz?

  I mean, I still think Jensen's a great guy.

• 1:35:53Lex Fridman?

  He is great.

• 1:35:54George Hotz?

  Why do this? You have a choice. You have a choice right now. Are you trying to cash out? You trying to buy a yacht? If you are, fine. But if you're trying to be the next huge semiconductor company, sell chips.

• 1:36:08Lex Fridman?

  Well, the interesting thing about Jensen is he is a big vision guy. So he has a plan, like, for 50 years down the road. So it makes me wonder, like.

• 1:36:21George Hotz?

  How does price gouging fit into it?

• 1:36:22Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, how does that, like, it doesn't seem to make sense as a plan.

• 1:36:28George Hotz?

  I worry that he's listening to the wrong people.

• 1:36:30Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's the sense I have, too, sometimes. Because I, despite everything, I think Nvidia is an incredible company. Well, one, so I'm deeply grateful to Nvidia for the products they've created in the past, right? And so.

• 1:36:47George Hotz?

  The 1080 Ti was a great GPU. Still have a lot of them.

• 1:36:49Lex Fridman?

  Still is, yeah. But at the same time, it just feels like.

• 1:36:57Lex Fridman?

  Feels like you don't want to put all your stock in Nvidia. And so Elon is doing, what Tesla is doing with autopilot and Dojo is the Apple way. Because they're not going to share Dojo with George Hots.

• 1:37:11George Hotz?

  I, I, I know. They should sell that chip. Oh, they should sell it. Even their accelerator, the accelerator that's in all the cars, the 30 watt one. Sell it. Why not?

• 1:37:22Lex Fridman?

  So open it up. Like, why does Tesla have to be a car company?

• 1:37:26George Hotz?

  Well, if you sell the chip, here's what you get.

• 1:37:28Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:29George Hotz?

  Make some money off the chips. It doesn't take away from your chip. You're going to make some money, free money. And also, the world is going to build an ecosystem of tooling for you.

• 1:37:39Lex Fridman?

  Right?

• 1:37:40George Hotz?

  You're not going to have to fix the bug in your 10H layer. Someone else already did.

• 1:37:46Lex Fridman?

  Well, the question, that's an interesting question. I mean, that's the question Steve Jobs asked. That's the question Elon Musk is perhaps asking is, do you want Tesla stuff inside other vehicles? Inside, potentially inside like iRobot vacuum cleaner?

• 1:38:03George Hotz?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:05George Hotz?

  I think you should decide where your advantages are. I'm not saying Tesla should start selling battery packs to automakers. Because battery packs to automakers, they're straight up in competition with you. If I were Tesla, I'd keep the battery technology totally.

• 1:38:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:17George Hotz?

  As far as we make batteries. But the thing about the Tesla TPU is anybody can build that. It's just a question of, you know, are you willing to spend the money?

• 1:38:28Lex Fridman?

  It could be a huge source of revenue potentially.

• 1:38:31George Hotz?

  Are you willing to spend the $100 million? Right? Anyone can build it. And someone will. And a bunch of companies now are starting trying to build AI accelerators. Somebody's going to get the idea right. And yeah, hopefully they don't get greedy. Because they'll just lose to the next guy who finally, and then eventually the Chinese are going to make knockoff Nvidia chips and that's.

• 1:38:50Lex Fridman?

  From your perspective, I don't know if you're also paying attention to Stan Tesla for a moment. They've, Elon Musk has talked about a complete rewrite of the neural net that they're using. That seems to, again, I'm half paying attention. But it seems to involve basically a kind of integration of all the sensors to where.

• 1:39:13Lex Fridman?

  It's a four dimensional view, you know, you have a 3D model of the world over time. And then you can, I think it's done both for the, for the actually, you know, so the neural network is able to, in a more holistic way, deal with the world and make predictions and so on, but also to make the annotation task more, you know, easier, like you can annotate the world in one place and it kind of distributes itself across the sensors and across the different, like the hundreds of tasks that are involved in the Hydra net. What are your thoughts about this rewrite? Is it just like some details that are kind of obvious that are steps that should be taken?

• 1:39:54Lex Fridman?

  Or is there something fundamental that could challenge your idea that end to end is the right solution?

• 1:40:02George Hotz?

  We're in the middle of a big rewrite now as well. We haven't shipped a new model in a bit.

• 1:40:05Lex Fridman?

  Of what kind?

• 1:40:07George Hotz?

  We're going from 2D to 3D. Right now, all our stuff, like for example, when the car pitches back, the lane lines also pitch back because we're assuming the flat world hypothesis. The new models do not do this. The new models output everything in 3D.

• 1:40:23Lex Fridman?

  But there's still no annotation, so the 3D is, it's more about the output. Yeah.

• 1:40:29George Hotz?

  We have, we have Z's and everything. We've.

• 1:40:31Lex Fridman?

  Z's.

• 1:40:32George Hotz?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:32Lex Fridman?

  We added the Z's.

• 1:40:33George Hotz?

  We had the Z's. We unified a lot of stuff as well. We switched from TensorFlow to PyTorch.

• 1:40:41George Hotz?

  My understanding of what Tesla's thing is, is that their annotator now annotates across the time dimension.

• 1:40:50George Hotz?

  I mean, cute. Why are you building an annotator?

• 1:40:55Lex Fridman?

  I, I find their entire pipeline, I find your vision, I mean, the vision of end to end very compelling, but I also like the engineering of the data engine that they've created. In terms of supervised learning. Pipelines, that thing is damn impressive. You're basically, the idea is that you have hundreds of thousands of people that are doing data collection for you by doing their experience. So that's kind of similar to the Kama AI model. And you're able to mine that data based on the kind of edge cases you need. I, I think it's harder to do in the end to end learning.

• 1:41:38Lex Fridman?

  The mining of the right edge cases, like that's where feature engineering is actually really powerful because like us humans are able to do this kind of mining a little better. But, but yeah, there's obvious, as we, as we know, there's obvious constraints and limitations to that idea.

• 1:41:55George Hotz?

  Karpathy just tweeted, he's like, you get really interesting insights if you salt, if you sort your validation set by loss and look at the highest loss examples.

• 1:42:06Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:07George Hotz?

  So yeah, I mean, you can do, we, we have, we have a little data engine like thing. We're training a segnet. And it's not fancy, it's just like, okay, train the new segnet, run it on a hundred thousand images and now take the thousand with highest loss. Select a hundred of those by human, put those, get those ones labeled, retrain, do it again. And so it's, it's a much less well-written data engine. And yeah, you can, you can take these things really far and it is impressive engineering. And if you truly need supervised data for a problem, yeah, things like data engine are at the high end of the, what is attention? Is a human paying attention? I mean, we're going to probably build something that looks like data engine to push our driver monitoring further.

• 1:42:52George Hotz?

  But for driving itself, you have it all annotated beautifully by what the human does.

• 1:42:56Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, that applies to driver attention as well. Do you want to detect the eyes? Do you want to detect blinking and pupil movement? Do you want to detect all the like face alignments, the landmark detection and so on? And then doing kind of reasoning based on that? Or do you want to take the entirety of the face over time and do end to end? I mean, it's obvious that over, eventually you have to do end to end with some calibration with some fixes and so on. But it's like. I don't know when that's the right move.

• 1:43:26George Hotz?

  Even if it's end to end, there actually is, there is no kind of um, you have to supervise that with humans. Whether a human is paying attention or not is a completely subjective judgment. Like you can try to like automatically do it with some stuff, but you don't have. If I record a video of a human, I don't have true annotations anywhere in that video. The only way to get them is with, you know, other humans labeling it really.

• 1:43:53Lex Fridman?

  Well, I don't know. You, you, so if you think deeply about it, you could, you might be able to just depending on the task, you maybe discover self annotating things like, you know, you, you can look at like steering wheel reversal, something like that. You can discover little moments of lapse of attention.

• 1:44:11George Hotz?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:12Lex Fridman?

  I mean, that's, that's where psychology comes in. Is there indicate, because you have so, so much data to look at. So you might be able to find moments when there's like just inattention that even with smartphone, if you want to detect smartphone use.

• 1:44:27George Hotz?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:27Lex Fridman?

  You can start to zoom in. I mean, that's the goldmine, a sort of the comma AI. I mean, Tesla is doing this too, right? Is there, they're doing annotation based on like self-supervised learning too. It's just a small part of the entire picture. It's, that's kind of the challenge of solving a problem in machine learning. If you can discover self-annotating parts of the problem, right?

• 1:44:55George Hotz?

  Our driver monitoring team is half a person right now.

• 1:44:58Lex Fridman?

  Half a person.

• 1:44:59George Hotz?

  You know, once we have.

• 1:45:00Lex Fridman?

  Scale to a full.

• 1:45:01George Hotz?

  Once we have, once we have two, three people on that team, I definitely want to look at self-annotating stuff for, for attention.

• 1:45:09Lex Fridman?

  Let's go back for a sec to, to a comma and what, you know, for people who are curious to try it out, how do you install a comma in say a 2020 Toyota Corolla? Or like, what are the cars that are supported? What are the cars that you recommend? And what does it take? You have a few videos out, but maybe through words, can you explain what's it take to actually install a thing?

• 1:45:33George Hotz?

  So we support, I think it's 91 cars, 91 makes and models.

• 1:45:39George Hotz?

  We get to 100 this year.

• 1:45:41Lex Fridman?

  Nice.

• 1:45:41George Hotz?

  The, yeah, the 2020 Corolla, great choice. The 2020 Sonata, it's using the stock longitudinal. It's using just our lateral control, but it's a very refined car. Their longitudinal control is not bad at all. So yeah, Corolla, Sonata. Or if you're willing to get your hands a little dirty and look in the right places on the internet, the Honda Civic is great, but you're going to have to install a modified EPS firmware in order to get a little bit more torque. And I can't help you with that. Comet does not officially endorse that. But we have been doing it. We didn't ever release it. We waited for someone else to discover it and then, you know.

• 1:46:23Lex Fridman?

  And you have a Discord server where people, there's a very active developer community.

• 1:46:29George Hotz?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:29Lex Fridman?

  I suppose. So depending on the level of experimentation you're willing to do, that's the community.

• 1:46:38George Hotz?

  If you, if you just want to buy it and you have a supported car.

• 1:46:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:42George Hotz?

  It's 10 minutes to install. There's YouTube videos. It's IKEA furniture level. If you can set up a table from IKEA, you can install a Comet 2 in your supported car and it will just work. Now you're like, oh, but I want this high end feature or I want to fix this bug. Okay. Well, welcome to the developer community.

• 1:47:00Lex Fridman?

  So what, if I wanted to, this is something I asked you offline like a few months ago. If I wanted to run my own code to, so use Comet as a platform and try to run something like OpenPilot, what does it take to do that?

• 1:47:18George Hotz?

  So there's a toggle in the settings called enable SSH. And if you toggle that, you can SSH into your device. You can modify the code. You can upload whatever code you want to it. There's a whole lot of people, so about 60% of people are running stock Comet. About 40% of people are running forks. And there's a community of, there's a bunch of people who maintain these forks. And these forks support different cars or they have, you know, different toggles. We try to keep away from the toggles that are like disabled driver monitoring. But, you know, there's some people might want that kind of thing. And like, you know, yeah, you can, it's your car. It's your, I'm not here to tell you, you know. We, we have some, you know, we ban, if you're trying to subvert safety features,

• 1:48:03George Hotz?

  you're banned from our Discord. I don't want anything to do with you, but there's some forks doing that.

• 1:48:08Lex Fridman?

  Got it. So you encourage responsible forking?

• 1:48:13George Hotz?

  Yeah, yeah, we encourage. Some people, you know, yeah, some people like there's forks that will do. Some people just like having a lot of readouts on the UI. Like a lot of like flashing numbers. So there's forks that do that. Some people don't like the fact that it disengages when you press the gas pedal. There's forks that disable that.

• 1:48:31Lex Fridman?

  Got it. Now, the the stock experience is what like? So it does both lane keeping and longitudinal control all together? So it's not separate like it is an autopilot?

• 1:48:41George Hotz?

  No. So, okay, um, some cars, we use the stock longitudinal control. We don't do the longitudinal control in all the cars. Some cars, the ACCs are pretty good in the cars. It's the lane keep that's atrocious than anything except for autopilot and super cruise.

• 1:48:54Lex Fridman?

  But, you know, you just turn it on and it it works? What does this engagement look like?

• 1:49:00George Hotz?

  Yeah, so we have, I mean, I'm very concerned about mode confusion. I've experienced it on super cruise and autopilot where like autopilot, like autopilot disengages. I don't realize that the ACC is still on. The lead car moves slightly over and then the Tesla accelerates to like whatever my set speed is super fast. I'm like, what's going on here?

• 1:49:22George Hotz?

  We have engaged and disengaged. And this is similar to my understanding. I'm not a pilot, but my understanding is either the pilot is in control or the copilot is in control. And we have the same kind of transition system. Either open pilot is engaged or autopilot is disengaged. Engage with cruise control, disengage with either gas, brake, or cancel.

• 1:49:44Lex Fridman?

  Let's talk about money. What's the business strategy for Kama?

• 1:49:48George Hotz?

  Profitable.

• 1:49:49Lex Fridman?

  Well, so you're

• 1:49:50George Hotz?

  We did it.

• 1:49:52Lex Fridman?

  So congratulations. What, so basically selling, so we should say Kama costs a thousand bucks, Kama 2?

• 1:50:00George Hotz?

  Two hundred for the interface of the car as well. It's twelve hundred. I'll send that.

• 1:50:05Lex Fridman?

  Nobody is usually upfront like this.

• 1:50:07George Hotz?

  Yeah, you gotta, you gotta add the tack on, right?

• 1:50:09Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I love it.

• 1:50:10George Hotz?

  I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna lie to you. Trust me, it will add $1,200 of value to your life.

• 1:50:14Lex Fridman?

  Yes, it's still super cheap.

• 1:50:16George Hotz?

  30 days, no questions asked, money back guarantee and prices are only going up. You know, if there ever is future hardware, it could cost a lot more than $1,200.

• 1:50:24Lex Fridman?

  So comma three is in the works. So it could be.

• 1:50:28George Hotz?

  All I, all I will say is future hardware is going to cost a lot more than the current hardware.

• 1:50:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, the, the people that use, the people I've spoken with that use comma, use OpenPilot. They, first of all, they use it a lot. So people that use it, they, they fall in love with it.

• 1:50:45George Hotz?

  Oh, our retention rate is insane.

• 1:50:47Lex Fridman?

  Which is a good sign.

• 1:50:48George Hotz?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:49Lex Fridman?

  It's a really good sign.

• 1:50:50George Hotz?

  Um, 70% of comma two buyers are daily active users.

• 1:50:54Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's amazing.

• 1:50:57George Hotz?

  Um, oh, also, we don't plan on stopping selling the comma two. Like, like it's, you know.

• 1:51:02Lex Fridman?

  So whatever you create that's beyond comma two.

• 1:51:07Lex Fridman?

  It would be, uh, it would be potentially a phase shift. Like it's, it's so much better that, like you could use comma two and you can use comma whatever.

• 1:51:16George Hotz?

  Depends what you want.

• 1:51:17Lex Fridman?

  3.41, 42.

• 1:51:19George Hotz?

  Yeah, you know, autopilot hardware one versus hardware two. The comma two is kind of like hardware one.

• 1:51:24Lex Fridman?

  Got it, got it. You can still use both, got it, got it. I think I heard you talk about retention rate with VR headsets that the average is just once.

• 1:51:32George Hotz?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:32Lex Fridman?

  Just fast, I mean, it's such a fascinating way to think about technology. And this is really, really good sign. And the other thing that people say about common is like, they can't believe they're getting this for a thousand bucks. Right? It's, it seems, it seems like a, some kind of steal. So, but in terms of like long-term business strategies, it basically to put, so it's currently in like a thousand plus cars.

• 1:51:57Lex Fridman?

  Uh, twelve hundred?

• 1:51:59George Hotz?

  More, more. Uh, so yeah, dailies is about, uh, dailies is about two thousand, weekly is about twenty five hundred, monthly is over three thousand.

• 1:52:09Lex Fridman?

  Wow.

• 1:52:10George Hotz?

  We've grown a lot since we last talked.

• 1:52:13Lex Fridman?

  Is the goal, like, can we talk crazy for a second? I mean, what's the, the goal to overtake Tesla? Let's talk, okay, so.

• 1:52:20George Hotz?

  I mean, Android did overtake iOS.

• 1:52:22Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's exactly it, right? So.

• 1:52:25George Hotz?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:25Lex Fridman?

  They did it. I actually don't know the timeline of that one. They, but let, let, let's talk, uh, cause everything is in alpha now. The autopilot, you could argue, is in alpha in terms of towards the big mission of autonomous driving, right? And so what, yeah, is your goal to overtake, to get millions of cars, uh, essentially?

• 1:52:44George Hotz?

  Of course. Where would it stop? Like, it's open source software. It might not be millions of cars with a piece of comma hardware, but yeah. I think OpenPilot at some point will cross over autopilot in, in, in users, just like Android crossed over iOS.

• 1:53:00Lex Fridman?

  How does Google make money from Android?

• 1:53:03George Hotz?

  Uh.

• 1:53:04Lex Fridman?

  It's, it's complicated. Their own devices make money.

• 1:53:08George Hotz?

  Google, Google makes money by just kind of having you on the internet.

• 1:53:12Lex Fridman?

  Uh, yes.

• 1:53:13George Hotz?

  Google search is built in, Gmail is built in. Android is just a shill for the rest of Google's ecosystem, kind of.

• 1:53:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but the problem is Android is not, is a, is a brilliant thing. I mean, Android arguably changed the world, so. There you go. That's, you can, you, you can feel good ethically speaking, but as a business strategy, it's questionable.

• 1:53:35George Hotz?

  Or sell hardware.

• 1:53:36Lex Fridman?

  Sell hardware.

• 1:53:37George Hotz?

  I mean, it took Google a long time to come around to it, but they are now making money on the Pixel.

• 1:53:40Lex Fridman?

  You're not about money, you're more about winning.

• 1:53:44George Hotz?

  Yeah, of course. No, but if only, if only ten percent of OpenPilot devices come from comma AI.

• 1:53:50Lex Fridman?

  You still make a lot.

• 1:53:51George Hotz?

  That is still, yes, that is a ton of money for our company.

• 1:53:53Lex Fridman?

  But can't somebody create a better comma using OpenPilot? Or you're basically saying we'll outcompete them?

• 1:53:59George Hotz?

  Well, I'll compete you. Is, can you create a better Android phone than the Google Pixel?

• 1:54:03Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:54:03George Hotz?

  I mean, you can, but like, you know.

• 1:54:05Lex Fridman?

  That. So you're confident, like, you know what the hell you're doing?

• 1:54:09George Hotz?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:10Lex Fridman?

  It's, it's, uh, uh, competence and merit.

• 1:54:14George Hotz?

  I mean, our money, yeah, our money comes from, we're a consumer electronics company.

• 1:54:17Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:17George Hotz?

  And put it this way, so we sold, we sold like three thousand commenters. Um, twenty five hundred right now. Uh, and like, okay, we're probably going to sell ten thousand units next year. Right? Ten thousand units, even just a thousand dollars a unit. Okay, we're at ten million in, uh, in, in, in, in revenue. Um, get that up to a hundred thousand, maybe double the price of the unit. Now we're talking like two hundred million revenue.

• 1:54:44Lex Fridman?

  You're actually making money. Uh, one of the rare semi-autonomous autonomous vehicle companies that are actually making money.

• 1:54:51George Hotz?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:53George Hotz?

  You know, if you have, if you look at a model, and we were just talking about this yesterday, if you look at a model and like you're testing, like you're A B testing your model. And if you're, you're, you're one branch of the A B test, the losses go down very fast in the first five epochs.

• 1:55:05Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:06George Hotz?

  That model is probably going to converge to something considerably better than the one with the losses going down slower. Why do people think this is going to stop? Why do people think one day there's going to be a great like, well, Waymo's eventually going to surpass you guys? Well, they're not.

• 1:55:22Lex Fridman?

  Do you see like a world where like a Tesla or a car like a Tesla would be able to basically press a button and you like switch to open pilot? You know, you, you know, they load in.

• 1:55:35George Hotz?

  I don't know. So I think, so first off, I think that we may surpass Tesla in terms of users. Uh, I do not think we're going to surpass Tesla ever in terms of revenue. I think Tesla can capture a lot more revenue per user than we can. Um, but this mimics the Android iOS model exactly. There may be more Android devices, but you know, there's a lot more iPhones than Google Pixels. So I think there'll be a lot more Tesla cars sold than pieces of comma hardware. And then as far as a Tesla owner being able to switch to open pilot, uh, does iOS, does iPhones run Android?

• 1:56:11Lex Fridman?

  No, but.

• 1:56:12George Hotz?

  You can if you really want to do it, but it doesn't really make sense. Like it's not.

• 1:56:16Lex Fridman?

  It doesn't make sense.

• 1:56:17George Hotz?

  Who cares?

• 1:56:17Lex Fridman?

  What about if a large company like automakers, four G M, Toyota came to George Hots? Or on the tech space, Amazon, Facebook, Google came with a large pile of cash? Uh, would, would you consider being, uh, purchased?

• 1:56:38Lex Fridman?

  What do you see that as a one possible?

• 1:56:41George Hotz?

  Not seriously, no. Um, I would probably uh see how much uh shit they'll entertain for me. Um, and if they're willing to like jump through a bunch of my hoops, then maybe. But like, no, not the way that M and A works today. I mean, we've been approached. And I laugh in these people's faces. I'm like, are you kidding?

• 1:57:01Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:02George Hotz?

  You know, cause it's so, it's so demeaning. The M and A people are so demeaning to companies. They treat the startup world as their innovation ecosystem. And they think that I'm cool with going along with that so I can have some of their scam fake Fed dollars. You know, Fed Coin, what am I gonna do with more Fed Coin?

• 1:57:20Lex Fridman?

  Fed Coin.

• 1:57:21George Hotz?

  Yeah, Fed Coin, man.

• 1:57:22Lex Fridman?

  I love that. So that's the cool thing about podcasting, actually, is uh people criticize. I don't know if you're familiar with uh Spotify uh giving Joe Rogan a hundred million.

• 1:57:32George Hotz?

  I heard something about that.

• 1:57:34Lex Fridman?

  And uh, you know, they respect, despite all the shit that people are talking about Spotify.

• 1:57:42Lex Fridman?

  People understand that podcasters like Joe Rogan know what the hell they're doing.

• 1:57:47George Hotz?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:48Lex Fridman?

  So they give them money and say, just do what you do. And like, the equivalent for you would be like, George, do what the hell you do, cause you're good at it. Try not to murder too many people. Like, try, like, there's some kind of common sense things like, just don't go on a weird rampage of.

• 1:58:08George Hotz?

  Yeah, it comes down to what companies I could respect, right?

• 1:58:12Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:58:12George Hotz?

  Um, you know, could I respect GM? Never.

• 1:58:17George Hotz?

  No, I couldn't. I mean, could I respect like a Hyundai? More so, right? That's, that's a lot closer.

• 1:58:24Lex Fridman?

  Toyota? What's your?

• 1:58:26George Hotz?

  Nah, nah, it's Korean is the way. I think, I think that, you know, the Japanese, the Germans, the US, they're all too, they're all too. You know, they all think they're too great.

• 1:58:36Lex Fridman?

  What about the tech companies? Apple?

• 1:58:39George Hotz?

  Apple is of the tech companies that I could respect. Apple's the closest. Yeah, I mean, I could never.

• 1:58:44Lex Fridman?

  It would be ironic. It would be ironic if if if Kama AI is is acquired by Apple.

• 1:58:50George Hotz?

  I mean, Facebook, look, I quit Facebook 10 years ago because I didn't respect the business model. Google has declined so fast in the last five years.

• 1:58:59Lex Fridman?

  What are your thoughts about Waymo as present and its future? Let me let me say, let me start by saying something nice, which is I've visited them a few times. And I've have ridden in their cars. And the engineering that they're doing, both the research and the actual development and the engineering they're doing and the scale they're actually achieving by doing it all themselves is really impressive. And the the balance of safety and innovation and like the cars work really well for the routes they drive. Like, it drives fast, which was very surprising to me.

• 1:59:41Lex Fridman?

  Like, it drives like the speed limit or faster than the speed limit it goes. And it works really damn well, and the interface is nice.

• 1:59:50George Hotz?

  In Chandler, Arizona, yeah.

• 1:59:51Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, in Chandler, it's in a very specific environment. So it I, you know, it gives me enough material in my mind to push back against the madmen of the world like George Hotz to be like, like, because you kind of imply there's zero probability they're going to win.

• 2:00:09George Hotz?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:09Lex Fridman?

  And after I've used, after I've ridden in it, to me, it's not zero.

• 2:00:15George Hotz?

  Oh, it's not for technology reasons.

• 2:00:17Lex Fridman?

  Bureaucracy?

• 2:00:19George Hotz?

  No, it's worse than that. It's actually for product reasons, I think.

• 2:00:23Lex Fridman?

  Oh, you think they're just not capable of creating an amazing product?

• 2:00:25George Hotz?

  Uh, no, I think that the product that they're building doesn't make sense.

• 2:00:32George Hotz?

  So a few things. You say the Waymos are fast. Benchmark a Waymo against a competent Uber driver.

• 2:00:40Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 2:00:40George Hotz?

  All right, the Uber driver is faster.

• 2:00:42Lex Fridman?

  It's not even about speed. It's the thing you said. It's about the experience of being stuck at a stop sign because pedestrians are crossing nonstop.

• 2:00:51George Hotz?

  I like when my Uber driver doesn't come to a full stop at the stop sign, you know? And

• 2:00:57George Hotz?

  So let's say the Waymos are 20% slower than than an Uber, right? Um, you can argue that they're going to be cheaper. And I argue that users already have the choice to trade off money for speed. It's called Uber Pool.

• 2:01:13George Hotz?

  I think it's like 15% of rides are Uber Pools. Right? Users are not willing to trade off money for speed. So the whole product that they're building is not going to be competitive with traditional ride sharing networks.

• 2:01:27Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 2:01:30George Hotz?

  Like, and also,

• 2:01:33George Hotz?

  whether there's profit to be made depends entirely on one company having a monopoly. I think that the level four autonomous ride sharing vehicles market is going to look a lot like the scooter market. If even the technology does come to exist, which I question. Who's doing well in that market?

• 2:01:51Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:51George Hotz?

  It's a race to the bottom, you know?

• 2:01:53Lex Fridman?

  Well, they could be, it could be closer to like an Uber and a Lyft where it's just a one or two players.

• 2:01:58George Hotz?

  Well, the scooter people have given up trying to market scooters as a practical means of transportation and they're just like, they're super fun to ride. Look at wheels, I love those things and they're great on that front.

• 2:02:11Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:12George Hotz?

  But from an actual transportation product perspective, I do not think scooters are viable and I do not think level four autonomous cars are viable.

• 2:02:20Lex Fridman?

  If you, uh, let's play a fun experiment. If you ran, let's do Tesla and let's do Waymo. If Elon Musk took a vacation for a year, he just said, screw it, I'm going to go live on an island, no electronics. And the board decides that we need to find somebody to run the company and they, they decide that you should run the company for a year. How do you run Tesla differently?

• 2:02:45George Hotz?

  I wouldn't change much.

• 2:02:47Lex Fridman?

  Do you think they're on the right track?

• 2:02:48George Hotz?

  I wouldn't change. I mean, I'd have some minor changes, but even even my debate with Tesla about, you know, end to end versus seg nets, like, that's just software. Who cares? Right? Like, it's not gonna, it's not like you're doing something terrible with seg nets. You're probably building something that's at least going to help you debug the end to end system a lot. Right? It's very easy to transition from what they have to like an end to end kind of thing.

• 2:03:15Lex Fridman?

  But and then I presume you would, in the Model Y, or maybe in the Model 3, start adding driver sensing with infrared?

• 2:03:24George Hotz?

  Yes, I would add, I would add, I would add infrared camera, infrared lights right away to those cars.

• 2:03:33Lex Fridman?

  And start collecting that data and do all that kind of stuff. Yeah.

• 2:03:36George Hotz?

  Very much. I think they're already kind of doing it. It's it's an incredibly minor change. If I actually were CEO of Tesla, first off, I'd be horrified that I wouldn't be able to do a good job as Elon. And then I would try to, you know, understand the way he's done things before.

• 2:03:48Lex Fridman?

  You would also have to take over his Twitter. So.

• 2:03:51George Hotz?

  God, I don't tweet.

• 2:03:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. What's your Twitter situation? Why? Why? Why are you so quiet on Twitter?

• 2:03:56George Hotz?

  Oh, I mean.

• 2:03:57Lex Fridman?

  The comma is like, what? What's your social network presence like? Because you, you on Instagram, you're you, you do live streams. You're you're you're, you understand the music of the internet, but you don't always fully engage into it. You're part time.

• 2:04:13George Hotz?

  I used to have a Twitter. Yeah. I mean, it's the Instagram is a pretty place. Instagram is a beautiful place. It glorifies beauty. I like I like Instagram's values as a network.

• 2:04:23Lex Fridman?

  Got it.

• 2:04:24George Hotz?

  Twitter glorifies conflict, glorifies, you know, like, like, like, like, like, you know, shots, taking shots at people. And it's like, you know, Twitter and Donald Trump are perfectly. They're perfect for each other.

• 2:04:39Lex Fridman?

  So Tesla's on Tesla's on the right track in your view.

• 2:04:42George Hotz?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:43Lex Fridman?

  Okay, so let's try, let's like really try this experiment. If you ran Waymo, let's say they're, I don't know if you agree, but they seem to be at the head of the pack of the kind of, what would you call that approach? Like, it's not necessarily lighter based because it's not about lighter.

• 2:05:01George Hotz?

  Level four robotaxi.

• 2:05:02Lex Fridman?

  Level four robotaxi, all in before any, before making any revenue. So they're probably at the head of the pack. If you were.

• 2:05:12Lex Fridman?

  Said, hey, George, can you please run this company for a year? How would you change it?

• 2:05:17George Hotz?

  I would go, I would get Anthony Levandowski out of jail and I would put him in charge of the company.

• 2:05:27Lex Fridman?

  Let's try to break that apart. One, do you want to make, do you want to destroy the company by doing that? Or do you mean, or do you mean you like renegade style thinking that pushes, that like throws away bureaucracy and goes to first principle thinking? What do you mean by that?

• 2:05:45George Hotz?

  I think Anthony Levandowski is a genius and I think he would come up with a much better idea of what to do with Waymo than me.

• 2:05:53Lex Fridman?

  So you mean that unironically, he is a genius?

• 2:05:55George Hotz?

  Oh, yes. Oh, absolutely. Without a doubt. I mean, I'm not saying there's no shortcomings, but in the interactions I've had with him, yeah.

• 2:06:06George Hotz?

  He's also willing to take, like, who knows what he would do with Waymo? I mean, he's also out there, like far more out there than I am.

• 2:06:12Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, his big risks. What do you make of him? I was, I was going to talk to him on this podcast and I was going back and forth. I'm such a gullible, naive human, like I see the best in people. And I slowly started to realize that there might be some people out there that like have multiple faces to the world. They're like deceiving and dishonest. I still refuse to like, I just, I trust people and I don't care if I get hurt by it. But like, you know, sometimes you have to be a little bit careful, especially platform wise and podcast wise. What do you, what am I supposed to think? So you think, you think he's a good person?

• 2:06:57George Hotz?

  Oh, I don't know. I don't really make moral judgments.

• 2:07:00Lex Fridman?

  It's difficult to.

• 2:07:01George Hotz?

  Oh, I mean this about the Waymo. Actually, I mean, that whole idea very non ironically about what I would do. The problem with putting me in charge of Waymo is Waymo is already $10 billion in the hole. Right? Whatever idea Waymo does, look, comma's profitable, comma's raised $8.1 million. That's small, you know, that's small money. Like I can build a reasonable consumer electronics company and succeed wildly at that and still never be able to pay back Waymo's $10 billion.

• 2:07:26Lex Fridman?

  So I think the basic idea with Waymo, we'll forget the 10 billion because they have some backing, but your basic thing is like, what can we do to start making some money?

• 2:07:36George Hotz?

  Well, no, I mean, my bigger idea is like, whatever the idea is that's going to save Waymo, I don't have it. It's going to have to be a big risk idea, and I cannot think of a better person than Anthony Levandowski to do it. So that is completely what I would do as CEO of Waymo. I would call myself a transitionary CEO, do everything I can to fix that situation up.

• 2:07:55Lex Fridman?

  Transitionary CEO.

• 2:07:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:59George Hotz?

  Because I can't, I can't do it, right? Like, I can't, I can't, I mean, I can talk about how what I really want to do is just apologize for all those corny, you know, ad campaigns and be like, here's the real state of the technology.

• 2:08:11Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's, like, I have several criticisms. I'm a little bit more bullish on Waymo than you seem to be, but one criticism I have is it went into corny mode too early. Like, it's still a startup. It hasn't delivered on anything. So it should be like more renegade and show off the engineering that they're doing, which can be impressive as opposed to doing these weird commercials of like, your friendly, your friendly car company.

• 2:08:37George Hotz?

  I mean, that's my biggest, my biggest snipe at Waymo was always, that guy's a paid actor. That guy's not a Waymo user. He's a paid actor. Look here, I found his call sheet.

• 2:08:46Lex Fridman?

  Do kind of like what SpaceX is doing with the rocket launches, just get, put the nerds up front, put the engineers up front and just like, show failures too, just.

• 2:08:56George Hotz?

  I love, I love SpaceX's, yeah.

• 2:08:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, the thing that they're doing is right, and it just feels like the right, but.

• 2:09:03George Hotz?

  I'm also excited to see them succeed.

• 2:09:05Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:05George Hotz?

  I can't wait to see Waymo fail, you know? Like, you lie to me, I want you to fail. You tell me the truth, you be honest with me, I want you to succeed.

• 2:09:13Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:15Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, and that requires the renegade CEO, right?

• 2:09:21Lex Fridman?

  I'm with you. I'm with you. I still have a little bit of faith in Waymo for the renegade CEO to step forward, but.

• 2:09:28George Hotz?

  It's not, it's not John Kraftic.

• 2:09:31Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's a, you can't.

• 2:09:33George Hotz?

  It's not Chris Olmstead. And I'm, those people may be very good at certain things.

• 2:09:38Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:39George Hotz?

  But they're not renegades.

• 2:09:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, because these companies are fundamentally, even though we're talking about billion dollars, all these crazy numbers, they're still like early-stage startups.

• 2:09:50George Hotz?

  I mean, and I, I just, I, if you are pre-revenue and you've raised $10 billion, I have no idea, like, like this just doesn't work. No, it's against everything Silicon Valley. Where's your minimum viable product? Where's your users? Where's your growth numbers? This is traditional Silicon Valley. Why do you not apply it to what you think you're too big to fail already? Like.

• 2:10:12Lex Fridman?

  How do you think autonomous driving will change society? So the mission is for Kama to solve self-driving.

• 2:10:23Lex Fridman?

  Do you have like a vision of the world of how it'll be different?

• 2:10:28Lex Fridman?

  Is it as simple as A to B transportation? Or is there like, because these are robots.

• 2:10:34George Hotz?

  It's not about autonomous driving in and of itself. It's what the technology enables.

• 2:10:40George Hotz?

  It's, I think it's the coolest applied AI problem. I like it because it has a clear path to monetary value. But as far as that being the thing that changes the world? I mean,

• 2:10:54George Hotz?

  no, like, like there's cute things we're doing in Kama, like who'd have thought you could stick a phone on the windshield and it'll drive? But like, really, the product that you're building is not something that people were not capable of imagining 50 years ago. So no, it doesn't change the world on that front. Could people have imagined the internet 50 years ago? Only true genius visionaries.

• 2:11:13Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:13George Hotz?

  Everyone could have imagined autonomous cars 50 years ago. It's like a car, but I don't drive it.

• 2:11:17Lex Fridman?

  See, I, I have this sense, and I told you, like, I'm, my long-term dream is robots with which you have deep, with whom you have deep connections.

• 2:11:28George Hotz?

  I have too.

• 2:11:30Lex Fridman?

  And there's different trajectories towards that. And I've been thinking, so been thinking of launching a startup.

• 2:11:39Lex Fridman?

  I see autonomous vehicles as a potential trajectory to that.

• 2:11:44Lex Fridman?

  That's not where the direction I would like to go, but I also see Tesla or even Kama AI like pivoting into into robotics broadly defined. That's at some stage in the way like you're mentioning, the internet didn't expect.

• 2:12:00George Hotz?

  Let's solve, you know, when I say a comma about this, we could talk about this, but let's solve self-driving cars first. Got to stay focused on the mission. Don't, don't, don't, you're not too big to fail for however much I think comma is winning. Like, no, no, no, no, no. You're winning when you solve level five self-driving cars and until then you haven't win and won. And, you know, again, you want to be arrogant in the face of other people? Great. You want to be arrogant in the face of nature? You're an idiot.

• 2:12:24Lex Fridman?

  Stay mission focused. Brilliantly put. Like I mentioned, thinking of launching a startup, I've been considering, actually before COVID, I've been thinking of moving to San Francisco.

• 2:12:34George Hotz?

  Oh, oh, I wouldn't go there.

• 2:12:36Lex Fridman?

  So why is, uh, well, and now I'm thinking about potentially Austin.

• 2:12:43Lex Fridman?

  And we're in San Diego now.

• 2:12:44George Hotz?

  San Diego, come here.

• 2:12:45Lex Fridman?

  So why, what, um,

• 2:12:49Lex Fridman?

  I mean, you're, you're such an interesting human. You've launched so many successful things. What, uh,

• 2:12:56Lex Fridman?

  why San Diego? What do you recommend? Why not San Francisco? Have you thought, so in your case, San Diego with Qualcomm and Snapdragon, I mean, that's an amazing combination, but.

• 2:13:08George Hotz?

  That wasn't really why.

• 2:13:09Lex Fridman?

  That wasn't the why?

• 2:13:10George Hotz?

  No, I mean, Qualcomm was an afterthought. Qualcomm was, it was a nice thing to think about. It's like you can have a tech company here. A good one. I mean, you know, I like Qualcomm, but no, um.

• 2:13:19Lex Fridman?

  Well, so why San Diego better than San Francisco? Why does San Francisco suck?

• 2:13:22George Hotz?

  Well, so, okay. So first off, we all kind of said like, we want to stay in California. People like the ocean. You know, California for, for its flaws. It's like a lot of the flaws of California are not necessarily California as a whole. And they're much more San Francisco specific.

• 2:13:36Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:37George Hotz?

  Um, San Francisco, so I think first tier cities in general have stopped wanting growth. Uh, well, you have like in San Francisco, you know, the voting class always votes to not build more houses because they own all the houses and they're like, well, you know, once people have figured out how to vote themselves more money, they're gonna do it. It is so insanely corrupt. Um, it is not balanced at all, like political party wise. You know, it's, it's, it's a one-party city and.

• 2:14:05Lex Fridman?

  For all the discussion of diversity. It's has, it's stops lacking real diversity of thought, of background, of approaches, the strategies of, yeah, ideas. It's, it's kind of a strange place that it's the loudest people about diversity and the biggest lack of diversity.

• 2:14:27George Hotz?

  Well, I mean, that's, that's what they say, right? It's the projection.

• 2:14:31Lex Fridman?

  Projection, yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. And even people in Silicon Valley tell me that's, uh, like high up people, everybody is like, this is a terrible place. It doesn't make sense.

• 2:14:41George Hotz?

  I mean, and coronavirus is really what killed it.

• 2:14:43Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:44George Hotz?

  Uh, San Francisco was the number one, uh, exodus during coronavirus.

• 2:14:49Lex Fridman?

  We still think San Diego is a, is a good place to be.

• 2:14:52George Hotz?

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we'll see. We'll see what happens with California a bit longer term. Like Austin's, Austin's an interesting choice. I wouldn't, I wouldn't, I don't have really anything bad to say about Austin, uh, either, except for the extreme heat in the summer, um, which, but that's like very on the surface, right?

• 2:15:11Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:11George Hotz?

  I think as far as like an ecosystem goes, it's, it's cool. I personally love Colorado.

• 2:15:16Lex Fridman?

  Colorado's great.

• 2:15:17George Hotz?

  Uh, yeah, I mean, you have these states that are, you know, like just way better run. Um, California is, you know, it's especially San Francisco. It's on a high horse and like,

• 2:15:29George Hotz?

  yeah.

• 2:15:29Lex Fridman?

  Can I ask you for advice to me and to others about what's it take to build a successful startup?

• 2:15:38George Hotz?

  Oh, I don't know. I haven't done that. Talk to someone who did that.

• 2:15:41Lex Fridman?

  Well, if you know.

• 2:15:45Lex Fridman?

  This is like another book of yours that I'll buy for $67, I suppose. So there's.

• 2:15:53George Hotz?

  One of these days, I'll sell out. Yeah, that's right. Jailbreaks are gonna be a dollar and books are gonna be 67.

• 2:15:58Lex Fridman?

  How I How I Jailbroke the iPhone by George Hotz.

• 2:16:03George Hotz?

  That's right. How I Jailbroke the iPhone and you can do it.

• 2:16:06Lex Fridman?

  You can do it.

• 2:16:07George Hotz?

  For 67.

• 2:16:08Lex Fridman?

  In 21 days.

• 2:16:09George Hotz?

  That's right. That's right.

• 2:16:11Lex Fridman?

  Oh, God. Okay, I can't wait. But quite. So you have an introspective. You have built a very unique company. I mean, not you, but you and others. But I don't know. There's no, there's nothing. You have an interest, but you haven't really sat down and thought about like, well, like if you and I were having a bunch of, we're having some beers and you're seeing that I'm depressed and whatever, I'm struggling. There's no advice you can give?

• 2:16:42George Hotz?

  Oh, I mean.

• 2:16:44Lex Fridman?

  More beer?

• 2:16:45George Hotz?

  More beer.

• 2:16:49George Hotz?

  Yeah, I think it's all very like situation dependent. Um, here's, okay, if I can give a generic piece of advice, it's the technology always wins. The better technology always wins and lying always loses. Build technology and don't lie.

• 2:17:09Lex Fridman?

  I'm with you. I agree very much.

• 2:17:11George Hotz?

  The long run, long run, sure.

• 2:17:12Lex Fridman?

  It's the long run.

• 2:17:13George Hotz?

  And you know what? The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. True fact.

• 2:17:18Lex Fridman?

  Well, this is, this is an interesting point because I ethically and just as a human believe that like, like hype and smoke and mirrors is not at any stage of the company is a good strategy. I mean, there's some like, you know, PR magic, kind of like, you know.

• 2:17:38George Hotz?

  Oh, hype around a new product, right? If there's a call to action, if there's like a call to action, like buy my new GPU. Look at it. It takes up three slots and it's this big. It's huge. Buy my GPU. Yeah, that's great.

• 2:17:47Lex Fridman?

  If you look at, you know, especially in that, in AI space broadly, but autonomous vehicles, like you can raise a huge amount of money on nothing. And the question to me is like, I'm against that. I'll never be part of that, I don't think. I hope not. Willingly not, but like, is there something to be said to essentially lying to raise money, like fake it till you make it kind of thing?

• 2:18:18George Hotz?

  I mean, this is Billy McFarlane, the Fire Festival, like we all, we all experienced, you know, what happens with that? No, no, don't fake it till you make it. Be honest and hope you make it the whole way.

• 2:18:31Lex Fridman?

  The technology wins.

• 2:18:32George Hotz?

  Right. The technology wins. And like, there is, I'm not, you're like the anti-hype, you know, that's Slava KPSS reference, but

• 2:18:42George Hotz?

  hype isn't necessarily bad. I loved camping out for the iPhones.

• 2:18:48George Hotz?

  You know, and as long as the hype is backed by like substance, as long as it's backed by something I can actually buy. And like, it's real, then hype is great and it's a great feeling. It's when the hype is backed by lies that it's a bad feeling.

• 2:19:03Lex Fridman?

  I mean, a lot of people call Elon Musk a fraud.

• 2:19:05George Hotz?

  How could he be a fraud?

• 2:19:06Lex Fridman?

  I've noticed this, this kind of interesting effect, which is he does tend to over promise. And deliver, what's, what's the better way to phrase it? Promise a timeline that he doesn't deliver on, he delivers much later on. What do you think about that? Cause I, I do that. I think that's a programmer thing.

• 2:19:26George Hotz?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:27Lex Fridman?

  I do that as well. You think that's a really bad thing to do or is, is that okay?

• 2:19:32George Hotz?

  I think that's, again, as long as like, you're working toward it and you're going to deliver on it, and it's not too far off. Right? Right? Like, like, you know, the whole, the whole autonomous vehicle thing, it's like, I mean, I still think Tesla's on track to, to, to beat us. I still think even with their, even with their missteps, they have advantages we don't have. You know, Elon is, is better than me at, at, at like marshalling massive amounts of resources. So, you know, I still think. Given the fact they're maybe making some wrong decisions, they'll end up winning. And like, it's fine to hype it if you're actually gonna win, right?

• 2:20:16George Hotz?

  If Elon says, "Look, we're gonna be landing rockets back on Earth in a year and it takes four." Like, he landed a rocket back on Earth and he was working toward it the whole time. I think there's some amount of like, I think what it becomes wrong is if you know you're not gonna meet that deadline. If you're lying.

• 2:20:32Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's brilliantly put. Like, this is what people don't understand, I think. Like, Elon believes everything he says.

• 2:20:40George Hotz?

  He does. As far as I can tell, he does.

• 2:20:43Lex Fridman?

  And I detected that in myself, too. Like, if I, it's only bullshit if you're like conscious of yourself lying.

• 2:20:52George Hotz?

  Yeah, I think so.

• 2:20:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:54George Hotz?

  Now, you can't take that to such an extreme, right? Like, in a way, I think maybe Billy McFarland believed everything he said, too.

• 2:21:01Lex Fridman?

  Right, that's how you start a cult and everybody kills themselves, yeah.

• 2:21:05George Hotz?

  Yeah, like, you need, you need, if there's like some factor on it, it's fine. And you need some people to like, you know, keep you in check. But like, if you deliver on most of the things you say and just the timelines are off, nah.

• 2:21:19Lex Fridman?

  It does piss people off, though. I wonder, but who cares? In a long arc of history, the people, everybody gets pissed off at the people who succeed. Which is one of the things that frustrates me about this world is they don't celebrate the success of others. Like, there's so many people that want Elon to fail. It's so fascinating to me. Like, what is wrong with you? Like, so Elon Musk talks about like people short, like they talk about financial. But I think it's much bigger than the financials. I've seen like the Human Factors community, they want, they want other people to fail. What, what, what?

• 2:22:03Lex Fridman?

  Like, even people, the harshest thing is like, you know, even people that like seem to really hate Donald Trump, they want him to fail.

• 2:22:12George Hotz?

  Yeah, I know.

• 2:22:13Lex Fridman?

  Or like the other president, or they want Barack Obama to fail. It's like.

• 2:22:18George Hotz?

  We're all on the same boat, man.

• 2:22:20Lex Fridman?

  It's weird, but I want that I would love to inspire that part of the world to change because

• 2:22:26George Hotz?

  Well.

• 2:22:26Lex Fridman?

  Damn it, if the human species is gonna survive, we should celebrate success. It seems like the efficient thing to do in this objective function that like we're all striving for is to celebrate the ones that like figure out how to like do better at that objective function. As opposed to like dragging them down back into the into the mud.

• 2:22:47George Hotz?

  I think there is, this is the speech I always give about the commenters on Hacker News. So first off, something to remember about the internet in general is commenters are not representative of the population.

• 2:22:59Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:00George Hotz?

  I don't comment on anything. You know, commenters are representative of a certain sliver of the population. And on Hacker News, a common thing I'll see is when you'll see something that's like, you know, promises to be wild out there and innovative. There is some amount of, you know, checking them back to earth, but there's also some amount of, if this thing succeeds,

• 2:23:26George Hotz?

  well, I'm 36 and I've worked at large tech companies my whole life.

• 2:23:33George Hotz?

  They can't succeed because if they succeed, that would mean that I could have done something different with my life. But we know that I couldn't have, we know that I couldn't have, and that's why they're gonna fail. And they have to root for them to fail to kind of maintain their world image.

• 2:23:48George Hotz?

  Tune it out.

• 2:23:48Lex Fridman?

  And they comment, well, it's hard. I so one of the things, one of the things I'm considering startup wise is to change that because I think the, I think it's also a technology problem. It's a platform problem.

• 2:24:04George Hotz?

  I agree.

• 2:24:04Lex Fridman?

  It's like, because the thing you said, most people don't comment.

• 2:24:10Lex Fridman?

  I think most people want to comment. They just don't because it's all the assholes who are commenting.

• 2:24:17George Hotz?

  Exactly. I don't want to be grouped in with them on that.

• 2:24:18Lex Fridman?

  You don't want to be at a party where everyone is an asshole. And so they, but that's a platform's problem that's.

• 2:24:25George Hotz?

  I can't believe what Reddit's become. I can't believe the group think in Reddit comments.

• 2:24:31Lex Fridman?

  There's a, Reddit is an interesting one because they're subreddits. And so you can still see, especially small subreddits.

• 2:24:39George Hotz?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:40Lex Fridman?

  That like, that are little like havens of like joy and positivity and like deep, even disagreement, but like nuanced discussion, but it's only like small little pockets. But that's, that's emergent. The platform is not helping that or hurting that. So I guess naturally, something about the internet, if you don't put in a lot of effort to encourage nuance and positive, good vibes, it's naturally going to decline into chaos.

• 2:25:12George Hotz?

  I would love to see someone do this as well.

• 2:25:13Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:14George Hotz?

  I think it's, yeah, very doable. This is.

• 2:25:17Lex Fridman?

  I think actually, so I feel like Twitter could be overthrown.

• 2:25:23George Hotz?

  Yashua Bach talked about how like, if you have like and retweet, like that's only positive wiring, right? The only way to do anything like negative there is with a comment. And that's like, that asymmetry is what gives, you know, Twitter its particular toxicness. Whereas I find YouTube comments to be much better because YouTube comments have a, have a, have an up and a down. And they don't show the downloads.

• 2:25:54Lex Fridman?

  Without getting into depth of this particular discussion, the point is to explore possibilities and get a lot of data on it. Because, I mean, I could disagree with what you just said. It's, it's, the point is it's unclear. It's a, it hasn't been explored in a really rich way. Like the, these questions of how to create platforms that encourage positivity.

• 2:26:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I think it's a it's a technology problem. And I think we'll look back at Twitter as it is now. Maybe it'll happen within Twitter. But most likely, somebody overthrows them is we'll look back at Twitter and and and say, we can't believe we put up with this level of toxicity.

• 2:26:34George Hotz?

  You need a different business model, too. Any any social network that fundamentally has advertising as a business model. This was in The Social Dilemma, which I didn't watch, but I liked it. It's like, you know, there's always the, you know, you're the product. You're not the uh, but they had a nuanced take on it that I really liked. And it said, the product being sold is influence over you. The product being sold is literally your, you know, influence on you. That can't be if that's your idea. Okay, well, you know, guess what? It can't not be toxic.

• 2:27:07Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, maybe there's ways to spin it like with with giving a lot more control to the user and transparency to see what is happening to them as opposed to in the shadows is possible. But that can't be the primary source of.

• 2:27:20George Hotz?

  But the users aren't, no one's gonna use that.

• 2:27:22Lex Fridman?

  It depends. It depends. It depends.

• 2:27:24George Hotz?

  I think I think that the you're you're not going to. You can't depend on self-awareness of the users.

• 2:27:31Lex Fridman?

  It's a it's another it's a longer discussion because you can't depend on it. But you can reward self-awareness. Like if for the ones who are willing to put in the work of self-awareness, you can reward them and incentivize and perhaps be pleasantly surprised how many people are are willing to be self-aware on the internet. Like we are in real life. Like I'm putting in a lot of effort with you right now, being self-aware about if I say something stupid or mean.

• 2:28:00George Hotz?

  Sure.

• 2:28:01Lex Fridman?

  I'll like look at your like body language. Like I'm putting in that effort. It's costly for an introvert, very costly. But on the internet, fuck it. Like, most people are like, I don't care if it if this hurts somebody. I don't care if this is not interesting or if this is, yeah, the mean or whatever.

• 2:28:19George Hotz?

  I think so much of the engagement today on the internet is so disingenuine, too.

• 2:28:23Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:23George Hotz?

  You're not doing this out of a genuine, this is what you think. You're doing this just straight up to manipulate others, whether you're in, you just became an ad.

• 2:28:32Lex Fridman?

  Okay, let's talk about a fun topic, which is programming. Here's another book idea for you. Let me pitch. What's your perfect programming setup? So like, this by George Hots. So like, what, listen, you're

• 2:28:47George Hotz?

  Give me, give me a MacBook Air, sit me in a corner of a hotel room and you know, I'll still

• 2:28:51Lex Fridman?

  So you really don't care? You don't fetishize like multiple monitors, keyboard?

• 2:28:57George Hotz?

  Those things are nice and I'm not gonna say no to them. But did they automatically unlock tons of productivity? No, not at all. I have definitely been more productive on a MacBook Air in a corner of a hotel room.

• 2:29:09Lex Fridman?

  What about IDE? So which operating system do you love? What text editor do you use? IDE? What, is there, is there something that is like the perfect? If you could just say the perfect productivity setup for George Hots?

• 2:29:28George Hotz?

  Doesn't matter.

• 2:29:29Lex Fridman?

  Doesn't, doesn't matter.

• 2:29:30George Hotz?

  It literally doesn't matter. You know, I guess I code most of the time in Vim. Like literally, I'm using an editor from the seventies, you know? You didn't, you didn't make anything better? Okay, VS Code is nice for reading code. There's a few things that are nice about it. I think that there, you can build much better tools. How like, Ida's Xref's work way better than VS Codes? Why?

• 2:29:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, actually, that's a good, good question. Like, why? I, I still use, sorry, Emacs for most. I've actually, I have to confess something dark. So I've never used Vim. It's, I think maybe I'm just afraid that my life has been like a waste. I'm so, I'm not, I'm not evangelical about Emacs. I, I think

• 2:30:14George Hotz?

  This, this is how I feel about TensorFlow versus PyTorch.

• 2:30:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:18George Hotz?

  Having just, like, we've switched everything to PyTorch now, put months into the switch. I have felt like I've wasted years on TensorFlow. I can't believe it. I can't believe how much better PyTorch is.

• 2:30:29Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:30George Hotz?

  I've used Emacs in Vim, doesn't matter.

• 2:30:32Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, still, just my, my heart somehow, I fell in love with Lisp. I don't know why. You can't, the heart wants what the heart wants. I don't, I don't understand it, but it just connected with me. Maybe it's the functional language that first I connected with. Maybe it's because so many of the AI courses before the deep learning revolution were taught with Lisp in mind. I don't know. I don't know what it is, but I'm, I'm stuck with it. But at the same time, like, why am I not using a modern IDE for some of these programming? I don't know.

• 2:30:58George Hotz?

  They're not that much better. I've used modern IDEs too.

• 2:31:01Lex Fridman?

  But at the same time, so like to just, well, not to disagree with you, but like I like multiple monitors. Like I, I have to do work on a laptop and it's, it's a pain in the ass. And also I'm addicted to the kinesis weird keyboard. You could, you could see there.

• 2:31:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. So you don't have any of that. You can just be in a, on a MacBook.

• 2:31:22George Hotz?

  I mean, look at work. I have three 24 inch monitors. I have a happy hacking keyboard. I have a razor death header mouse like.

• 2:31:30Lex Fridman?

  But it's not essential for you.

• 2:31:32George Hotz?

  No.

• 2:31:32Lex Fridman?

  Let's go to a day in the life of George Hotz. What is the perfect day productivity wise? So we're not talking about like Hunter S. Thompson, uh, drugs and, and uh, let's look at productivity. Like what, what's the day look like on like hour by hour? Is there any regularities that create a magical George Hotz experience?

• 2:31:56George Hotz?

  I can remember three days in my life and I remember these days vividly when

• 2:32:03George Hotz?

  I've gone through kind of radical transformations to the way I think. And what I would give, I would pay a hundred thousand dollars if I could have one of these days tomorrow. The days have been so impactful and one was first discovering L E Iza Vudkowski on the singularity and reading that stuff and like, you know, my mind was blown.

• 2:32:25George Hotz?

  The next was discovering, uh, the Hutter Prize and that AI is just compression. Like finally understanding AI XI and what all of that was. You know, I like read about it when I was 18, 19, I didn't understand it. And then the fact that like lossless compression implies intelligence. The day that I was shown that, um, and then the third one is controversial. The day I found a blog called Unqualified Reservations and, uh, read that and I was like.

• 2:32:51Lex Fridman?

  Wait, which one is that? That's, uh, what's the guy's name?

• 2:32:53George Hotz?

  Curtis Yarvin.

• 2:32:54Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. So many people tell me I'm supposed to talk to him.

• 2:32:58George Hotz?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:58Lex Fridman?

  He looks, he sounds insane.

• 2:33:01George Hotz?

  Definitely.

• 2:33:01Lex Fridman?

  Brilliant, but insane or both. I don't know.

• 2:33:04George Hotz?

  The day I found that blog was another like, this was during like, like gamergate and kind of the run up to the 2016 election. And I'm like. Wow. Okay, the world makes sense now. This, this, like, I had a framework now to interpret this. Just like I got the framework for AI and a framework to interpret technological progress. Like, those days when I discovered these new frameworks were.

• 2:33:23Lex Fridman?

  Oh, interesting. So it's not about, but what, what was special about those days? How did those days come to be? Is it just you got lucky? Like?

• 2:33:31George Hotz?

  Sure.

• 2:33:32Lex Fridman?

  I, well, you just encountered a hotter prize on, uh, on hack and use or something like that?

• 2:33:38George Hotz?

  Um.

• 2:33:39Lex Fridman?

  Like, what?

• 2:33:40George Hotz?

  But, you see, I don't think it's just, see, I don't think it's just that, like, I could have gotten lucky at any point. I think that, in a way.

• 2:33:47Lex Fridman?

  You were ready at that moment.

• 2:33:48George Hotz?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:33:49Lex Fridman?

  To receive the information.

• 2:33:52Lex Fridman?

  But is there some magic to the day today of like, like, eating breakfast? And it's the mundane things.

• 2:34:00George Hotz?

  Nah.

• 2:34:00Lex Fridman?

  Nothing.

• 2:34:01George Hotz?

  Nah, I drift through, I drift through life.

• 2:34:03Lex Fridman?

  Without structure.

• 2:34:05George Hotz?

  I drift through life hoping and praying that I will get another day like those days.

• 2:34:09Lex Fridman?

  And there's nothing in particular you do to, uh, to be a receptacle for another, for day number four?

• 2:34:16George Hotz?

  No, I didn't do anything to get the other ones, so I don't think I have to really do anything now. I took a month-long trip to New York and, I mean, the Ethereum thing was the highlight of it, but the rest of it was pretty terrible. I did a two-week road trip and I got, I had to turn around, I had to turn around. I'm driving in, uh, in Gunnison, Colorado. I passed through Gunnison and, uh, the snow starts coming down. There's a pass up there called Monarch Pass. In order to get through to Denver, you gotta get over the Rockies. And I had to turn my car around. I couldn't, I, I watched, uh, I watched, uh, F-150 go off the road. I'm like, I gotta go back. And, like, that day was meaningful, because, like, like, it was real. Like, I actually had to turn my car around.

• 2:34:59George Hotz?

  Um, it's rare that anything even real happens in my life. Even as, you know, mundane is the fact that, yeah, there was snow. I had to turn around, stay in Gunnison and leave the next day.

• 2:35:08Lex Fridman?

  Something about that moment felt real. Okay, so, actually, it's interesting to break apart the three moments you mentioned, if it's okay. So, uh, I always have trouble pronouncing his name, but Alausa Yurkowski.

• 2:35:21George Hotz?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:24Lex Fridman?

  So what? How did your worldview change in starting to consider the the exponential growth of AI and AGI that he thinks about and the threats of artificial intelligence and all that kind of ideas? Can you? Is it like, can you maybe break apart like what exactly was so magical to you? Was it transformational experience?

• 2:35:48George Hotz?

  Today, everyone knows him for threats and AI safety. This was pre that stuff. There was, I don't think, a mention of AI safety on the page. This is this is old Yudkaski stuff. He'd probably denounce it all now. He'd probably be like, that's exactly what I didn't want to happen. Sorry, man.

• 2:36:06Lex Fridman?

  Is there something specific you can take from his work that you can remember?

• 2:36:09George Hotz?

  Yeah. It was this realization that

• 2:36:14George Hotz?

  computers double in power every 18 months and humans do not. And they haven't crossed yet, but if you have one thing that's doubling every 18 months and one thing that's staying like this, you know, here's your log graph. Here's your line, you know, you calculate that.

• 2:36:32Lex Fridman?

  And that did that open the door to the exponential thinking? Like thinking that like, you know what? With technology, we can actually transform the world.

• 2:36:42George Hotz?

  It opened the door to human obsolescence. It it opened the door to realize that in my lifetime, humans are going to be replaced.

• 2:36:51Lex Fridman?

  And then the matching idea to that of artificial intelligence with the Hutter Prize.

• 2:36:58Lex Fridman?

  You know, I'm torn. I go back and forth on what I think about it.

• 2:37:01George Hotz?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:02Lex Fridman?

  But the the the basic thesis is it's nice. It's a nice compelling notion that we can reduce the task of creating an intelligent system, a generally intelligent system into the task of compression. So you can think of all of intelligence in the universe, in fact, as a kind of compression.

• 2:37:21Lex Fridman?

  Do you find that was that just at the time you found that as a compelling idea? Do you still find that a compelling idea?

• 2:37:27George Hotz?

  I still find that a compelling idea. I think that it's not that useful day to day. But actually, um, one of maybe my quests before that was a search for the definition of the word intelligence. And I never had one. And I definitely have a definition of the word compression. It's a very simple, uh, straightforward one. And you know what compression is? You know what lossless is? Lossless compression, not lossy, lossless compression. And that that is equivalent to intelligence, which I believe. I'm not sure how useful that definition is day to day, but like I now have a framework to understand what it is.

• 2:38:03Lex Fridman?

  And he just 10x the, the, uh, the prize for that competition like recently, a few months ago. You ever thought of taking a crack at that?

• 2:38:10George Hotz?

  Oh, I did. Oh, I did. I spent, I spent the next, after I found the prize, I spent the next six months of my life trying it. And, uh, well, that's when I started learning everything about AI. And then I worked at Vicarious for a bit, and then I learned, read all the deep learning stuff. And I'm like, okay, now I like, I'm caught up to modern AI.

• 2:38:29Lex Fridman?

  Wow.

• 2:38:29George Hotz?

  And I had, I had a really good framework to put it all in from the compression stuff.

• 2:38:35George Hotz?

  Right? Like some of the first, uh, some of the first deep learning models I played with were, uh, were GPT, GPT, basically. But before transformers, before it was still, uh, RNNs to, to do, uh, character prediction.

• 2:38:48Lex Fridman?

  But by the way, on the compression side, I mean, the, especially in neural networks, what do you make of the lossless requirement with the Hutter prize? So, you know, human intelligence and, and neural networks can probably compress stuff pretty well, but there, it would be lossy. It's imperfect.

• 2:39:07George Hotz?

  Uh, you can turn a lossy compression into a lossless compressor pretty easily using an arithmetic encoder, right? You can take an arithmetic encoder and you can just encode the noise with maximum efficiency. Right? So even if you can't predict exactly what the next character is, the better a probability distribution you can put over the next character. You can then use an arithmetic encoder to, uh, right? You don't have to know whether it's an E or an I. You just have to put good probabilities on them and then, you know, code those. And if you have, it's a bits of entropy thing, right?

• 2:39:37Lex Fridman?

  So let me, on that topic, it'd be interesting as a little side tour. What are your thoughts in this year about GPT-3? And these language models and these transformers? Is there something interesting to you as an AI researcher? Or is there something interesting to you as an autonomous vehicle developer?

• 2:39:55George Hotz?

  Nah, I think, uh, I think it's overhyped. I mean, it's not like, it's cool. It's cool for what it is, but no, we're not just gonna be able to scale up to GPT-12 and get general purpose intelligence. Like, your loss function is literally just, you know, you know, cross entropy loss on the character, right? Like, that's not the loss function of general intelligence.

• 2:40:15Lex Fridman?

  Is that obvious to you?

• 2:40:16George Hotz?

  Yes.

• 2:40:18Lex Fridman?

  Can you imagine that, like, to play devil's advocate on yourself? Is it possible that you can, the GPT-12 will achieve general intelligence with something as dumb as this kind of loss function?

• 2:40:32George Hotz?

  I guess it depends what you mean by general intelligence. So there's another problem with the GPTs. And that's that they don't have a, uh, they don't have long-term memory.

• 2:40:44Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 2:40:44George Hotz?

  Alright, so like, just GPT-12, a scaled up version of GPT-2 or 3? I find it hard to believe.

• 2:40:57Lex Fridman?

  Well, you can scale it in, it's, yeah, so it's a hardcore, hard-coded length, but you can make it wider and wider and wider.

• 2:41:05George Hotz?

  Yeah. Uh, you're gonna get, you're gonna get cool things from those systems, but I don't think you're ever gonna get something that can like, you know, build me a rocket ship.

• 2:41:18Lex Fridman?

  What about self-driving? So, you know, you can use transformer with video, for example. You think, is there something in there?

• 2:41:28George Hotz?

  No, because, I mean, look, we use, we use a Gru. We use a Gru, we could change that Gru out to a transformer. I think driving is much more Markovian than language.

• 2:41:40Lex Fridman?

  So Markovian, you mean like the memory, which aspect of?

• 2:41:43George Hotz?

  Markovian, I mean that like most of the information in the state at T minus one is also in the is in state tape.

• 2:41:50Lex Fridman?

  I see, yeah.

• 2:41:51George Hotz?

  Right? And it kind of like drops off nicely like this, whereas sometime with language, you have to refer back to the third paragraph on the second page.

• 2:41:58Lex Fridman?

  I feel like.

• 2:41:59George Hotz?

  There's not many, like, like you can say like speed limit signs, but there's really not many things in autonomous driving that look like that.

• 2:42:04Lex Fridman?

  But if you look at, to play devil's advocate, is the risk estimation thing that you've talked about is kind of interesting. Is it feels like there might be some longer term aggregation of context necessary to be able to figure out like the context. Yeah, I'm not even sure I'm believing my.

• 2:42:26George Hotz?

  We have a nice, we have a nice like vision model, which outputs like a one or two four dimensional perception space.

• 2:42:34George Hotz?

  Can I try transformers on it? Sure, I probably will. At some point, we'll try transformers and then we'll just see, do they do better? Sure, I'm.

• 2:42:41Lex Fridman?

  But it might not be a game changer.

• 2:42:42George Hotz?

  No, well, I'm not like, like, might transformers work better than Gru's for autonomous driving? Sure. Might we switch? Sure. Is this some radical change? No. Okay, we use a slightly different, you know, we switch from RNNs to Gru's like, okay, maybe it's Gru's to transformers, but no, it's not. Yeah.

• 2:42:58Lex Fridman?

  I, well, on the, on the topic of general intelligence, I don't know how much I've talked to you about it, like what?

• 2:43:05Lex Fridman?

  Do you think we'll actually build an AGI? Like if you look at Ray Kurzweil with Singularity, do you have like an intuition about? You're kind of saying driving is easy.

• 2:43:16George Hotz?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:17Lex Fridman?

  And I, I tend to personally believe that solving driving will have really deep, important impacts on our ability to solve general intelligence. Like, I, I think driving doesn't require general intelligence, but I think they're going to be neighbors in a way that it's like deeply tied. Because it's so like driving is so deeply connected to the human experience that I think solving one will help solve the other. But but so I don't see I don't see driving as like easy and almost like separate than general intelligence. But like, what's your vision of a future with a singular? Do you see there'll be a single moment like a singularity where it'll be a face shift?

• 2:44:01Lex Fridman?

  Are we in the singularity now? Like, what do you have crazy ideas about the future in terms of AGI?

• 2:44:06George Hotz?

  We're definitely in the singularity now.

• 2:44:09Lex Fridman?

  We are?

• 2:44:09George Hotz?

  Of course, of course. Look at the bandwidth between people. The bandwidth between people goes up, right? The singularity is just, you know, when the bandwidth, but.

• 2:44:18Lex Fridman?

  What do you mean by the bandwidth of people?

• 2:44:19George Hotz?

  Communications tools, the whole world is networked. The whole world is networked and we raise the speed of that network, right?

• 2:44:25Lex Fridman?

  Oh, so you you think the communication of information in a distributed way is an empowering thing for collective intelligence?

• 2:44:33George Hotz?

  Oh, I didn't say it's necessarily a good thing, but I think that's like when I think of the definition of the singularity. Yeah, it seems kind of right.

• 2:44:39Lex Fridman?

  I see like it's a change in the world beyond which like the world be transformed in ways that we can't possibly imagine.

• 2:44:47George Hotz?

  No, I mean, I think we're in the singularity now in the sense that there's like, you know, one world and a monoculture and it's also linked.

• 2:44:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I mean, I I kind of share the intuition that the the singularity will originate from the collective intelligence of us ants versus the like some single system AGI type thing.

• 2:45:06George Hotz?

  Oh, I totally agree with that. Yeah, I I don't I don't really believe in like like a hard take off AGI kind of thing.

• 2:45:16George Hotz?

  Yeah, I don't think I don't even think AI is all that different in kind from what we've already been building. With respect to driving, I think driving is a subset of general intelligence and I think it's a pretty complete subset. I think the tools we develop at Kama will also be extremely helpful to solving general intelligence. And that's, I think, the real reason why I'm doing it. I don't care about self-driving cars. It's a cool problem to beat people at.

• 2:45:41Lex Fridman?

  But yeah, I mean, yeah, you're kind of you're of two minds. So one, you do have to have a mission and you want to focus and make sure you get you get there. You can't forget that, but at the same time, there is a thread that's much bigger than the connects the entirety of your effort. That's much bigger than just driving.

• 2:46:02George Hotz?

  With AI and with general intelligence, it is so easy to delude yourself into thinking you've figured something out when you haven't. If we build a level five self-driving car, we have indisputably built something.

• 2:46:13Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:14George Hotz?

  Is it general intelligence? I'm not going to debate that. I will say we've built something that provides huge financial value.

• 2:46:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, beautifully put. That's the engineering credo, like just, just build the thing. It's like, that's why I'm with, with, with Elon on go to Mars.

• 2:46:29George Hotz?

  Yeah, it's a great one.

• 2:46:30Lex Fridman?

  You can argue like, who the hell cares about going to Mars? But the reality is, set that as a mission, get it done.

• 2:46:38George Hotz?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:38Lex Fridman?

  And then you're going to crack some problem that you've never even expected in the process of doing that. Yeah.

• 2:46:44George Hotz?

  Yeah, I mean, I think if I had a choice between humanity going to Mars and solving self-driving cars, I think going to Mars is better, but I don't know, I'm more suited for self-driving cars. I'm an information guy, I'm not a modernist, I'm a post-modernist.

• 2:46:57Lex Fridman?

  Post-modernist. All right, beautifully put. Let me, let me drag you back to programming for a sec. What three, maybe three to five programming languages should people learn, do you think? Like, if you look at yourself, what did you get the most out of, from learning?

• 2:47:13George Hotz?

  Well, so, everybody should learn C and assembly. We'll start with those two.

• 2:47:18Lex Fridman?

  Assembly?

• 2:47:19George Hotz?

  Yeah. If you can't code in assembly, you don't know what the computer's doing. You don't understand, like, you don't have to be great in assembly, but you have to code in it. And then like, you have to appreciate assembly in order to appreciate all the great things C gets you. And then you have to code in C in order to appreciate all the great things Python gets you. So I'll just say, assembly, C, and Python, we'll start with those three.

• 2:47:40Lex Fridman?

  The, the memory allocation of, of C and the, the, the fact that, so assembly is to give you a sense of just how many levels of abstraction you get to work on in modern day programming.

• 2:47:51George Hotz?

  Yeah, you get graph coloring for, for assignment, register assignment and compilers.

• 2:47:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:55George Hotz?

  Like, you know, you gotta do, you know, the compiler, your computer only has a certain number of registers, yet you can have all the variables you want in a C function, you know?

• 2:48:02Lex Fridman?

  So you get to start to build intuition about compilation, like what a compiler gets you.

• 2:48:08Lex Fridman?

  What else?

• 2:48:09George Hotz?

  Um, well, then there is, then there's kind of a, so those are all very imperative programming languages. Then there's two other paradigms for programming that everybody should be familiar with. Um, one of them is functional. Uh, you should learn Haskell and take that all the way through. Learn a language with dependent types like Coq. Um, learn that whole space, like the very PL theory heavy languages.

• 2:48:33Lex Fridman?

  And Haskell is your favorite functional? What, is that the go-to, you'd say?

• 2:48:37George Hotz?

  Yeah, I'm not, I'm not a great Haskell programmer. I wrote a compiler in Haskell once. There's another paradigm, and actually, there's one more paradigm that I'll even talk about after that, that I never used to talk about when I would think about this. But the next paradigm is learn Verilog or V H D L. Understand this idea of all of the instructions execute at once.

• 2:48:56George Hotz?

  If I have a block in Verilog and I write stuff in it, it's not sequential. They all execute at once.

• 2:49:04George Hotz?

  And then like, think like that, that's how hardware works.

• 2:49:07Lex Fridman?

  To be, so I guess assembly doesn't quite get you that. Assembly is more about compilation and Verilog is more about the hardware, like giving a sense of what actually is the hardware is doing.

• 2:49:19George Hotz?

  Assembly, C, Python are straight, like they, they sit right on top of each other. In fact, C is, well, C is kind of coded in C, but you could imagine the first C was coded in assembly and Python is actually coded in C. So, you know, you can straight up go on that.

• 2:49:34Lex Fridman?

  Got it. And then Verilog gives you, that's brilliant. Okay.

• 2:49:38George Hotz?

  And then I think there's another one now. Everyone Carpathia calls it programming 2.0, which is learn a, I'm not even gonna, don't learn TensorFlow, learn PyTorch.

• 2:49:49Lex Fridman?

  So, machine learning. We've got to come up with a better term than programming 2.0 or, um, but yeah.

• 2:49:57George Hotz?

  It's a programming language. Learn it.

• 2:50:00Lex Fridman?

  I wonder if it can be formalized a little bit better. Which feels like we're in the early days of what that actually entails.

• 2:50:08George Hotz?

  Data-driven programming?

• 2:50:10Lex Fridman?

  Data-driven programming, yeah. But it's so fundamentally different as a paradigm than the others. Like, it almost requires a different skill set.

• 2:50:21Lex Fridman?

  But you think it's still, yeah.

• 2:50:24Lex Fridman?

  And PyTorch versus TensorFlow, PyTorch wins?

• 2:50:27George Hotz?

  It's the fourth paradigm. It's the fourth paradigm that I've kind of seen. There's like this, you know, imperative, functional hardware. I don't know a better word for it. And then ML.

• 2:50:39Lex Fridman?

  Do you have advice?

• 2:50:42Lex Fridman?

  For people that wanna, you know, get into programming, wanna learn programming? You have a video. What is programming noob lessons exclamation point? And I think the top comment is like, warning, this is not for noobs. Do you have a noob?

• 2:51:01Lex Fridman?

  Like, TLDW for that video, but also? A noob friendly advice on how to get into programming?

• 2:51:10George Hotz?

  You are never going to learn programming by watching a video called Learn Programming. The only way to learn programming, I think, and the only one is that the only way everyone I've ever met who can program well, learned it all in the same way. They had something they wanted to do. And then they tried to do it. And then they were like, oh, well, okay. This is kind of, you know, it'd be nice if the computer could kind of do this. And then, you know, that's how you learn. You just keep pushing on a project.

• 2:51:40George Hotz?

  So the only advice I have for learning programming is go program.

• 2:51:43Lex Fridman?

  Somebody wrote to me a question like, we don't really, they're looking to learn about recurrent neural networks. And saying like, my company's thinking of doing, using recurrent neural networks for time series data, but we don't really have an idea of where to use it yet. We just wanna, like, do you have any advice on how to learn about? These are these kind of general machine learning questions. And I think the answer is like, actually have a problem that you're trying to solve and just.

• 2:52:11George Hotz?

  I see that stuff, oh my God, when people talk like that, they're like, I heard machine learning is important. Could you help us integrate machine learning with macaroni and cheese production?

• 2:52:22George Hotz?

  You're just, I don't even, you can't help these people. Like, who lets you run anything? Who lets that kind of person run anything?

• 2:52:29Lex Fridman?

  I think we're all, we're all beginners at some point, so.

• 2:52:34George Hotz?

  It's not like they're a beginner. It's like, my problem is not that they don't know about machine learning. My problem is that they think that machine learning has something to say about macaroni and cheese production. Or like, I heard about this new technology. How can I use it for why? Like, I don't know what it is, but how can I use it for why?

• 2:52:54Lex Fridman?

  That's true. You have to build up an intuition of how, because you might be able to figure out a way, but like the prerequisite is you should have a macaroni and cheese problem to solve first.

• 2:53:03George Hotz?

  Exactly.

• 2:53:04Lex Fridman?

  And then two, you should have more traditional, like, the learning process should involve more traditionally applicable problems in the space of whatever that is, of machine learning. And then see if it can be applied to.

• 2:53:17George Hotz?

  At least start with, tell me about a problem. Like, if you have a problem, you're like, you know, some of my boxes aren't getting enough macaroni in them. Can we use machine learning to solve this problem? That's much, much better than, how do I apply machine learning to macaroni and cheese?

• 2:53:32Lex Fridman?

  One big thing, maybe this is me talking to the audience a little bit, because I get these days so many messages, advice on how to like, learn stuff, okay?

• 2:53:46Lex Fridman?

  My, this, this is not me being mean, I think this is quite profound, actually, is you should Google it.

• 2:53:53George Hotz?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:53:54Lex Fridman?

  Like, one of the, like, skills that you should really acquire as an engineer, as a researcher, as a thinker, like, one, there's two, two complementary skills. Like, one is with a blank sheet of paper with no internet to think deeply. And then the other is to Google the crap out of the questions you have. Like, that's actually a skill. And people often talk about, but like, doing research, like pulling at the thread and like looking up different words, going into like GitHub repositories with two stars and like looking how they did stuff, like looking at the code or going on Twitter, seeing like there's little pockets of brilliant people that are like having discussions.

• 2:54:38Lex Fridman?

  Like if you're and you're a scientist, go into signal processing community. If you're an AI person, going into the psychology community, like like switch communities, like keep searching, searching, searching, because it's so much better to invest in like finding somebody else who already solved your problem than than is to try to solve the problem. And because they've often invested years of their life, like entire communities are probably already out there who have tried to solve your problem.

• 2:55:10George Hotz?

  I think they're the same thing. I think you go try to solve the problem. And then in trying to solve the problem, if you're good at solving problems, you'll stumble upon the person who solved it already.

• 2:55:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but the stumbling is really important. I think that's a skill that people should really put, especially in undergrad, like search. If you ask me a question, how should I get started in deep learning, like especially? Like, that is just so Googleable. Like, the whole point is you Google that and you get a million pages and just start looking at them.

• 2:55:44George Hotz?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:45Lex Fridman?

  Start pulling at the thread, start exploring, start taking notes, start getting advice from a million people that already like spent their life answering that question, actually.

• 2:55:56George Hotz?

  Oh, well, yeah, I mean, that's definitely also, yeah, when people like ask me things like that, I'm like, trust me, the top answer on Google is much, much better than anything I'm going to tell you. Right?

• 2:56:03Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. People ask, it's an interesting question. Let me know if you have any recommendations. What three books, technical or fiction or philosophical, had an impact on your life or you would recommend perhaps?

• 2:56:18George Hotz?

  Uh, maybe we'll start with the least controversial, Infinite Jest. Infinite Jest is a...

• 2:56:28Lex Fridman?

  David Foster Wallace?

• 2:56:29George Hotz?

  Yeah, it's a book about wireheading, really.

• 2:56:33George Hotz?

  Very enjoyable to read, very well-written. You know, you will, you will, you will grow as a person reading this book. It's effort.

• 2:56:44George Hotz?

  And I'll set that up for the second book, which is pornography. It's called Atlas Shrugged.

• 2:56:50George Hotz?

  Which.

• 2:56:52Lex Fridman?

  Atlas Shrugged is pornography?

• 2:56:53George Hotz?

  Yeah, I mean, it is. I will not, I will not defend the, I will not say Atlas Shrugged is a well-written book. It is entertaining to read, certainly, just like pornography. The production value isn't great. You know, there's a 60-page monologue in there that Ayn Rand's editor really wanted to take out, and she paid, she paid out of her pocket to keep that 60-page monologue in the book. But it is a great book for a kind of framework

• 2:57:24George Hotz?

  of human relations. And I know a lot of people are like, "Yeah, but it's a terrible framework." Yeah, but it's a framework.

• 2:57:31Lex Fridman?

  Just for context, in a couple of days, I'm speaking with, for probably four-plus hours, with Yaron Brook, who's the main living, remaining objectivists, objectivist.

• 2:57:44George Hotz?

  Interesting.

• 2:57:45Lex Fridman?

  So I've always found this philosophy quite interesting on many levels. One, of how repulsive some percent of, large percent of the population find it, which is always, always funny to me when people are like unable to even read a philosophy because of some, I think that says more about their psychological perspective on it.

• 2:58:11George Hotz?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:11Lex Fridman?

  But, but there is something about objectivism and Ayn Rand's philosophy that's deeply connected to this idea of capitalism, of the ethical life is the productive life.

• 2:58:27Lex Fridman?

  That was always compelling to me. It didn't seem as, like, I didn't seem to interpret it in the negative sense that some people do.

• 2:58:36George Hotz?

  To be fair, I read that book when I was 19.

• 2:58:38Lex Fridman?

  So it had an impact at that point? Yeah, it's true.

• 2:58:40George Hotz?

  Yeah, and the, the bad guys in the book have this slogan, "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need." And I'm looking at this, and I'm like, "These are the most, this is Team Rocket-level cartoonishness." Right? No bad guy. And then when I realized that was actually the slogan of the Communist Party. Like, wait a second. No, no, no, no, no, you're telling me this really happened?

• 2:59:05Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, one of the criticisms of her work is she has a cartoonish view of good and evil. Like, that there's like, the, the reality isn't, Jordan Peterson says this, is that each of us have the capacity for good and evil in us. As opposed to like, there's some characters who are purely evil and some characters are purely good.

• 2:59:23George Hotz?

  And that's in a way why it's pornographic.

• 2:59:26Lex Fridman?

  The production value, I love it.

• 2:59:27George Hotz?

  Well, evil is punished and there's very clear like, you know, there's no, there's no, you know, just like porn doesn't have, you know, like, character growth, you know, neither does Alan Shrogg, like.

• 2:59:40Lex Fridman?

  Brilliant, well put. But a nineteen year old George Hotz, it was, it was good enough.

• 2:59:45George Hotz?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:59:46Lex Fridman?

  What, uh, what's the third? You have something?

• 2:59:48George Hotz?

  Um, I could give, I, these, these two, I'll just throw out, uh, they're sci fi, uh, Perputation City. Um, great thing to start thinking about copies of yourself. And then, um,

• 2:59:58Lex Fridman?

  Who's that by?

• 2:59:59George Hotz?

  That is, uh, Greg Egan. Uh, he's a, that might not be his real name, some Australian guy, might not be Australian, I don't know. Um, and then this one's online, it's called The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect.

• 3:00:13George Hotz?

  It's a story set in a post singularity world, it's interesting.

• 3:00:17Lex Fridman?

  Is there, uh, can you, either of the worlds, do you find something philosophical interesting in them that you can comment on?

• 3:00:24George Hotz?

  I mean, it is clear to me that, uh, Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect is like written by an engineer, uh, which is, it, it, it's very, it's very almost a pragmatic take on a utopia in a way.

• 3:00:43Lex Fridman?

  Positive or negative?

• 3:00:46George Hotz?

  That's up to you to decide, reading the book. And the ending of it is very interesting as well, and I didn't realize what it was. I first read that when I was fifteen. I've reread that book several times in my life. And it's short, it's fifty pages, everyone should go read it.

• 3:01:01Lex Fridman?

  What's, uh, sorry, this is a little tangent. I've been working through the foundation. I've been, I haven't read much sci-fi in my whole life and I'm trying to fix that the last few months. That's been a little side project. What's, uh, to use the greatest sci-fi novel that people should read? Or is it?

• 3:01:20George Hotz?

  I mean, I would, I would, yeah, I would, I would say like, yeah, Permutation City, Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect.

• 3:01:23Lex Fridman?

  Got it.

• 3:01:24George Hotz?

  I don't know. I, I didn't like Foundation. Uh, I thought it was way too modernist.

• 3:01:29Lex Fridman?

  Do you like Dune and like all of those?

• 3:01:31George Hotz?

  I've never read Dune. I've never read Dune. I, I have to read it. Uh, Fire Upon the Deep is interesting. Uh, okay. I mean, look, everyone should read, everyone should read Neuromancer. Everyone should read Snow Crash. If you haven't read those, like, start there.

• 3:01:45Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I haven't read Snow Crash.

• 3:01:47George Hotz?

  Never read Snow Crash? Oh, it's, I mean, it's very entertaining. Go to Lesher Bach and if you want the controversial one, Bronze Age Mindset.

• 3:01:56Lex Fridman?

  All right, I'll look into that one.

• 3:01:58George Hotz?

  Those aren't sci-fi, but just to round out books.

• 3:02:02Lex Fridman?

  So, a bunch of people asked me on Twitter and Reddit and so on for advice. So what advice would you give a young person today about life?

• 3:02:15Lex Fridman?

  What, uh, yeah, I mean, looking back, especially when you're young, younger, you did, uh, and you continued it. You've accomplished a lot of interesting things. Is there some advice from those?

• 3:02:30Lex Fridman?

  From that life of yours that you can pass on?

• 3:02:32George Hotz?

  If college ever opens again, I would love to give a graduation speech. Um, at that point, I will put a lot of somewhat satirical effort into this question.

• 3:02:43Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, at this, uh, you haven't written anything at this point.

• 3:02:46George Hotz?

  Oh, you know what? Always wear sunscreen. This is water, like.

• 3:02:50Lex Fridman?

  I think you're plagiarizing.

• 3:02:52George Hotz?

  I mean, you know, but, but that's the, that's the like, well, clean your room, you know? Yeah, you can plagiarize from, from, from all of this stuff and it's, it's.

• 3:03:04George Hotz?

  There is no, self-help books aren't designed to help you. They're designed to make you feel good. Like, whatever advice I could give, you already know. Everyone already knows. Sorry, it doesn't feel good.

• 3:03:21George Hotz?

  Right? Like, you know, you know, I wonder what if I tell you that you should, you know, eat well and read more and it's not gonna do anything. I think the whole like genre of those kind of questions is meaningless.

• 3:03:38Lex Fridman?

  I don't know.

• 3:03:38George Hotz?

  If anything, it's don't worry so much about that stuff. Don't be so caught up in your head.

• 3:03:43Lex Fridman?

  Right. I mean, you're, yeah, in the sense that your whole life, if your whole existence is like moving version of that advice. I don't know.

• 3:03:54Lex Fridman?

  There's, there's something, I mean, there's something in you that resists that kind of thinking and that in itself is, is just illustrative of who you are. And there's something to learn from that, I think. You're, you're clearly not overthinking stuff.

• 3:04:12George Hotz?

  Yeah. And you know what?

• 3:04:13Lex Fridman?

  It's a gut thing.

• 3:04:14George Hotz?

  I even when I talk about my advice, I'm like, my advice is only relevant to me.

• 3:04:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:18George Hotz?

  It's not relevant to anybody else. I'm not saying you should go out, if you're the kind of person who overthinks things, to stop overthinking things. It's not bad. It doesn't work for me. Maybe it works for you. I, you know, I don't know.

• 3:04:28Lex Fridman?

  Let me ask you about love.

• 3:04:30George Hotz?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:32Lex Fridman?

  I think the last time we talked about the meaning of life and it was, it was kind of about winning.

• 3:04:39George Hotz?

  Of course.

• 3:04:41Lex Fridman?

  I don't think I've talked to you about love much, whether romantic or just love for the common humanity amongst us all. What role has love played in your life in this, in this quest for winning? Where does love fit in?

• 3:04:57George Hotz?

  Well, the word love, I think, means several different things. There's love in the sense of, maybe I could just say there's like love in the sense of opiates and love in the sense of oxytocin and then love in the sense of,

• 3:05:14George Hotz?

  maybe like a love for math. I don't think fits into either of those first two paradigms.

• 3:05:20Lex Fridman?

  So each of those, have they, have they, have they given something to you?

• 3:05:26Lex Fridman?

  In your life?

• 3:05:27George Hotz?

  I'm not that big of a fan of the first two.

• 3:05:31Lex Fridman?

  Why?

• 3:05:34George Hotz?

  For the same reason I'm not a fan of, you know, for the same reason I don't do opiates and don't take ecstasy. Right? And there were times, look, I've tried both. Um, I liked opiates way more than I liked ecstasy. Uh, but they're not. The ethical life is the productive life? So maybe that's my follow with, with, with those. And then like, yeah, a sense of, I don't know, like abstract love for humanity. I mean, the abstract love for humanity, I'm like, yeah, I've always felt that. And I guess it's hard for me to imagine not feeling it. And maybe there's people who don't and I don't know.

• 3:06:13Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's just like a background thing that's there. I mean, since we brought up, uh, drugs, let me ask you. This is becoming more and more a part of my life because I'm talking to a few researchers that are working on psychedelics. I've eaten shrooms a couple of times and it was fascinating to me that like the mind can go to like, just fascinating that mind can go to places I didn't imagine it could go. And I was very friendly and, and positive and exciting and everything was kind of hilarious in, in the, in the place, wherever my mind went, that's where I went. Is, uh, what do you think about psychedelics? Do you think they have, what do you think the mind goes? Have you done psychedelics?

• 3:06:56Lex Fridman?

  What, where do you think the mind goes? Uh, is there something useful to learn about the places it goes? Once you come back?

• 3:07:04George Hotz?

  You know, I find it interesting that this idea that psychedelics have something to teach is almost unique to psychedelics. Right? People don't argue this about amphetamines. And I'm not.

• 3:07:18Lex Fridman?

  That's true.

• 3:07:19George Hotz?

  And I'm not really sure why.

• 3:07:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:21George Hotz?

  I think all of the drugs have lessons to teach. I think there's things to learn from opiates. I think there's things to learn from amphetamines. I think there's things to learn from psychedelics, things to learn from marijuana. Um, but also at the same time, recognize that I don't think you're learning things about the world. I think you're learning things about yourself.

• 3:07:40Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 3:07:41George Hotz?

  Um, and you know, what's the, even it might've even been, uh, might've even been a Timothy Leary quote, I don't want to misquote him, but the idea is basically like, you know, everybody should look behind the door, but then once you've seen behind the door, you don't need to keep going back. Um, so, I mean, and that's my thoughts on, on all real drug use too. So maybe for caffeine.

• 3:08:03Lex Fridman?

  It's a little experience that is good to have, but.

• 3:08:08George Hotz?

  Oh, yeah, no, I mean, yeah, I guess psychedelics are definitely.

• 3:08:12Lex Fridman?

  So you're a fan of new experiences, I suppose?

• 3:08:14George Hotz?

  Yes.

• 3:08:15Lex Fridman?

  Because they all contain a little, especially the first few times, it contains some lessons that can be picked up.

• 3:08:20George Hotz?

  Yeah, and I'll revisit psychedelics maybe once a year.

• 3:08:26George Hotz?

  Usually smaller doses. Maybe they turn up the learning rate of your brain? I've heard that, like that.

• 3:08:34Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's cool.

• 3:08:35George Hotz?

  Big learning rates have pros and cons.

• 3:08:38Lex Fridman?

  Last question, and this is a little weird one, but you've called yourself crazy in the past.

• 3:08:45Lex Fridman?

  First of all, on a scale of one to 10, how crazy would you say are you?

• 3:08:48George Hotz?

  Oh, I mean, it depends how you, you know, when you compare me to Elon Musk and Anthony Levandowski, not so crazy.

• 3:08:54Lex Fridman?

  So like, like a seven?

• 3:08:56George Hotz?

  Let's go with six.

• 3:08:58Lex Fridman?

  Six, six, six. What?

• 3:09:02George Hotz?

  I like seven, seven's a good number.

• 3:09:03Lex Fridman?

  Seven, all right, well, I'm sure day by day it changes, right? So, but you're in that, in that area. What?

• 3:09:13Lex Fridman?

  In thinking about that, what do you think is the role of madness? Is that a feature or a bug if you were to dissect your brain?

• 3:09:22George Hotz?

  So, okay, from like a, like, mental health lens on crazy? I'm not sure I really believe in that. I'm not sure I really believe in like a lot of that stuff. Right, this concept of, okay, you know, when you get over to like, like, like, like hardcore bipolar and schizophrenia, these things are clearly real, somewhat biological. And then over here on the spectrum, you have like ADD and oppositional defiance disorder and these things that are like, wait, this is normal spectrum human behavior, like this isn't.

• 3:09:56George Hotz?

  You know, where's the the line here? And why is this like a problem? So there's this whole, you know, the neurodiversity of humanity is huge. Like, people think I'm always on drugs. People are always saying this to me on my streams. I'm like, guys, you know, like, I'm real open with my drug use. I'd tell you if I was on drugs. And, you know, yeah, I had like a cup of coffee this morning, but other than that, this is just me.

• 3:10:18Lex Fridman?

  You're witnessing my brain in action.

• 3:10:22Lex Fridman?

  So so the word madness doesn't even make sense in the in the rich neurodiversity of humans.

• 3:10:31George Hotz?

  I think it makes sense, but only for like some insane extremes. Like, if you are actually like visibly hallucinating,

• 3:10:44George Hotz?

  you know, that's okay.

• 3:10:45Lex Fridman?

  But there is the kind of spectrum on which you stand out. Like, that that's like if I were to look, you know, at decorations on a Christmas tree or something like that, like, if you were a decoration, that would catch my eye. Like, that thing is sparkly.

• 3:11:03Lex Fridman?

  Whatever the hell that thing is. There's something to that. Just like refusing to be boring. Or maybe boring is the wrong word, but to, yeah, I mean, be willing to sparkle, you know?

• 3:11:22George Hotz?

  Yeah, it's it's like somewhat constructed. I mean, I am who I choose to be.

• 3:11:29George Hotz?

  I'm gonna say things as true as I can see them. I'm not gonna I'm not gonna lie.

• 3:11:35Lex Fridman?

  And but that's a really important feature in itself. So like, whatever the neurodiversity of your whatever your brain is, not putting constraints on it that force it to to fit into the mold of what society is like defines what you're supposed to be. So you're one of the specimens that that doesn't mind being yourself.

• 3:11:58George Hotz?

  Being right is super important, except at the expense of being wrong.

• 3:12:07Lex Fridman?

  Without breaking that apart, I think it's a beautiful way to end it. George, you're one of the most special humans I know. It's truly an honor to talk to you. Thanks so much for doing it.

• 3:12:16George Hotz?

  Thank you for having me.

• 3:12:18Lex Fridman?

  Thanks for listening to this conversation with George Hots. And thank you to our sponsors. Four Sigmatic, which is the maker of delicious mushroom coffee. Decoding Digital, which is a tech podcast that I listen to and enjoy. And ExpressVPN, which is the VPN I've used for many years. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Fridman. And now let me leave you with some words from the great and powerful Linus Torvalds. Talk is cheap. Show me the code.

• 3:13:05Lex Fridman?

  Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.