George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God

What possible ideas do you have for how human species ends? Sure. I think the most obvious way to me is wire heading. We end up amusing ourselves to death. We end up all staring at that infinite TikTok and forgetting to eat. Maybe it's even more benign than this. Maybe we all just stop reproducing. Now, to be fair, it's probably hard to get all of humanity.

You know, I sell phone calls to Comma for a thousand dollars and some guy called me. It's a thousand dollars. You can talk to me for half an hour. He is like, "Yeah, okay. Time doesn't exist and I really wanted to share this with you." I'm like, "Oh, what do you mean time doesn't exist?" I think time is a useful model, whether it exists or not. Right. Does quantum physics exist? Well, it doesn't matter. It's about whether it's a useful model to describe reality. Is time maybe compressive? Do you think there is an objective reality or is everything just useful models? Underneath it all is there an actual thing that we're constructing models for?

I think that we're going to get super scary memes once the AIs actually are superhuman. You think AI will generate memes?

Well, let me bring up, Eliezer Yudkowsky who recently sat where you're sitting. He thinks that AI will almost surely kill everyone. Do you agree with him or not? Yes, but maybe for a different reason.

You like virtual reality? I love it.

Sure. No. I think there's a lot of value in it. Look, I just started my second company. My third company will be AI Girlfriends. I mean it. I want to find out what your fourth company is after that.

I like how you're already thinking company. All right. Before we go to company number three and company number four, let's go to company number two. All right.

Oh, you're a Mets fan? A RISC fan and a Mets fan. What's the hope that AMD has? You did a build with AMD recently that I saw. How does the 7,900 XTX compare to the RTX 4090 or 4080? Oh, well, let's start with the fact that the 7,900 XTX kernel drivers don't work. If you run demo apps and loops, it panics the kernel.

All right. Right now, the only way to do that is with Nvidia GPUs if you want performance and stability. Interesting. It's a costly investment emotionally to go with AMD's. Well, let me on a tangent, ask you, you've built quite a few PCs. What's your advice on how to build a good custom PC for, let's say, for the different applications that you use for gaming, for machine learning? Well, you shouldn't build one. You should buy a box from the Tiny Corp.

Since you mentioned openpilot, I'd love to get an update in the company number one, comma.ai world. How are things going there in the development of semi autonomous driving? Almost no one talks about FSD anymore and even less people talk about openpilot. We've thought the problem, we solved it years ago.

Well, let's talk about good code and bad code. I would say, for generic scripts that I write just offhand, 80% of it is written by GPT, just like quick offhand stuff. So not libraries, not performing code, not stuff for robotics and so on. Just quick stuff because so much of programming is doing some boilerplate, but to do so efficiently and quickly because you can't really automate it fully with generic method, a generic kind of IDE type of recommendation or something like this. You do need to have some of the complexity of language models. Yeah, I guess if I was really writing, maybe today, if I wrote a lot of data parsing stuff... I don't play CTFs anymore, but if I still play CTFs, a lot of is just you have to write a parser for this data format or admin of code. I wonder when the models are going to start to help with that code and they may. And the models also may help you with speed and the models are very fast, but where the models won't, my programming speed is not at all limited by my typing speed. And in very few cases, it is yes. If I'm writing some script to just parse some weird data format, sure, my programming speed is limited by my typing speed.

Yeah. That data is really, really powerful. It's the human supervision. What do you think are the chances? What do you think in general that LLaMA was open sourced? I just did a conversation with Mark Zuckerberg and he's all in on open source. Who would've thought that Mark Zuckerberg would be the good guy? No. I mean, it

Well, so speaking of which, he worked at Twitter for a bit. I did.

Right? Thank you for noticing. Yeah. I don't know if it's ironic or non, or sarcastic or non. What do you think of prompt engineering as a scientific and engineering discipline and maybe art form?

Well, you mentioned, because I talked to Mark about faith and God, and you said you were impressed by that. What's your own belief in God and how does that affect your work? I never really considered, when I was younger, I guess my parents were atheists, so I was raised kind of atheist. And I never really considered how absolutely silly atheism is because I create-

Have you talked to Andre Kaparthy or have you talked to Elon about Tiny Corp? He went to work at OpenAI.

You're older, you're wiser. What's the meaning of life, George Hotz? To win.