George Hotz steps down as Comma.ai CEO and appoints replacement to grow

George Hotz, also known as iPhone jailbreaker ‘Geohot’, is stepping down as CEO of his company Comma.ai, which focuses on developing hardware and software for self-driving cars. He will soon be announcing a replacement, who will help the company grow further.

Hotz tells TechCrunch that his company, which now has 15 employees, needs to grow to 50 employees to be able to release a “true consumer product.” He adds: “We have good growth rates and now is the time to grow faster. It is now much more an execution problem than a vision problem. And maybe I’m not the best executor.”

He assures the site that Comma.ai’s intentions will not change. “We have always been the North Korea among the self-driving car companies; we follow our own agenda.” Hotz describes self-driving cars as “the coolest problem in applied artificial intelligence” and states that his life goal is still to “solve AI.”

It is not yet known who will replace Hotz, according to TechCrunch the successor will be announced at the end of this week. The founder will not leave the company, but will work within a new division to research building behavioral models for the control of autonomous vehicles. Hotz owns the majority of the shares of Comma.ai.

In July, he announced that his company is “halfway through developing driver assistance for consumers.” Comma.ai developed the so-called Openpilot software for this, which can be found on GitHub and mainly works with Hondas and Toyotas. Currently, the company is collecting the necessary data from drivers, which they can share with the company using special hardware. It currently consists of three products, the Eon dashcam, the Panda OBD interface and the Giraffe connector.

Ultimately, full autonomy is the company’s goal. Originally the intention was to sell a kit with which cars could be equipped with driving assistance, but the American road safety commission did not agree.