GeoHot or George Hotz is famous for being the first person to jailbreak the iPhone several years ago. He remained a part of the jailbreaking scene for a few years, he even developed a jailbreak for the PlayStation 3 which landed him in a lot of trouble with Sony. He has been out of the scene for some time now but late last year a profile on him revealed that he was working on a self-driving car in his garage. Mr. Hotz has now received millions of dollars in backing for his ambitious project.
Hotz has been working on this project since October last year. His self-driving tech is a bit different than what’s already being done. He doesn’t program rules about driving the car, instead, the car relies on deep learning to watch Hotz drive around and automatically train itself on how to drive on public roads.
One of the most prominent venture capital funds in Silicon Valley, Andreessen Horowitz, is providing $3.1 million to Hotz so that he can bring more engineers onboard and transform his self-driving car tech into a proper product which can eventually be sold.
The fund is known for taking chances on companies or products that might not make much sense in the beginning, it has previously funded the likes of Oculus, Jawbone, Instagram and even Twitter.
Filed in . Read more about Geohot and Self-Driving Cars. Source: engadget