George Francis Hotz (born October 2, 1989), alias geohot, is an American security hacker, entrepreneur,[1] and software engineer.

[13][14] On July 13, 2010, Hotz announced the discontinuation of his jailbreaking activities, citing demotivation over the technology and the unwanted personal attention.

[22] On December 29, 2010, hacking group fail0verflow did a presentation at the 27th Chaos Communications Congress where they exposed a mistake of Sony in their usage of ECDSA signatures without publishing the corresponding private key.

In response to his continued publication of PS3 exploit information, Sony filed on January 11, 2011, for an application for a temporary restraining order (TRO) against him in the US District Court of Northern California.

[34] The exploit is built around the CVE-2014-3153 vulnerability,[35][36] which was discovered by hacker Pinkie Pie, and it involves an issue in the futex subsystem that in turn allows for privilege escalation.

[39][40][9][41] On July 16, 2014, Google hired Hotz to work with the Project Zero team[42] where he developed Qira for dynamically analysing application binaries.

[48] In an interview with Bloomberg, Hotz revealed that the company was building vehicular automation technology based on machine learning algorithms.

[55][56] Kristen Lee stated on Jalopnik that the NHTSA was simply trying to open a dialog, and commented: "Instead, they got the worst attitude possible from Silicon Valley: try and regulate us, thought leaders, and we’ll take our ball and go home.

[58][59] On September 14, 2018, comma.ai announced Hotz would become the Head of Research Team for the project, and appointed Riccardo Biasini as the new CEO of the company.

[61] On January 7, 2020, comma.ai debuted its $999 comma two ADAS (driver-assist) device at the annual CES tech show in Las Vegas.

[69] [70] On May 24, 2023, tiny corp announced that they raised $5.1M to build computers for machine learning and develop neural network framework called tinygrad.

[72] tinygrad aims to realize performance gains over PyTorch through a number of optimizations, including dynamic compilation, fusing of operations, and a greatly simplified backend.

[77] Hotz competed at the 2007 ISEF where his 3D imaging project, entitled "I want a Holodeck", received awards and prizes in several categories including a $20,000 Intel scholarship.

[80] In August 2013, Hotz attended the DEF CON hacker convention with Carnegie Mellon's Plaid Parliament of Pwning (PPP).

[81] Later in 2013, Hotz also competed in the 2013 New York University Tandon School of Engineering Cyber Security Awareness Week (CSAW).

[82] In August 2014, Hotz once again competed as part of Carnegie Mellon's PPP to win the DEF CON CTF tournament for a second year in a row.