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Elon Musk has hired hacker and rival entrepreneur behind self-driving technology George Hotz, to fix the currently broken Twitter search function within three months.
Hotz got famous in the tech world for developing IOS jailbreaks and reverse engineering the PlayStation 3 for which he was sued by Sony Computer Entertainment.
Musk attempted to recruit the hacker for Tesla before, but they could not agree on the terms of the job.
Hotz went on to start Comma AI, a company that developed a software aimed to take on Tesla’s autopilot AI.
Musk criticised the move in 2015 questioning the abilitiy of an individual like Hotz or a tiny business (such as Comma AI) “that lacks extensive engineering validation capability” to develop self-driving software that can be utilized in real cars.
With the development of Comma’s “openpilot” system, Hotz immediately set out to disprove the Tesla CEO.
Now, Musk has hired Hotz for a three-month internship to tackle a job that would normally require a whole engineering team.
The internship ensued after Hotz said he agreed with Musk’s “extremely hardcore” ultimatum to Twitter employees, which said they had to work “long hours at high intensity” or leave the company.
Hotz said “this is the attitude that builds incredible things” and that he would be willing to intern at the company. To which Musk responded, “Sure, let’s talk.”
The 33-year-old New Jersey native has now embarked on the internship in exchange of the “cost of living in San Francisco.”
Read also: Activists call for Twitter advertisers to withdraw ads (commsroom.co)
As part of his big plans for his 12 weeks at Twitter, Hotz wishes to eliminate the login prompt that appears when a user has scrolled for too long.
He also wants to make sure that search results are more relevant.
“[I]f I just get rid of the pop up I still consider my internship a win. I have a chrome extension on my laptop to block it. [R]eminds me of the guy who got a job at Apple, made Wallet automatically delete your expired boarding passes, and quit the next week,” he said.
Hotz has also sought out former rivals to determine if they are interested in collaborating on the bird app’s overhaul.
Among these former rivals is Andrej Karpathy, a former director of AI at Tesla, whom Hotz asked if he wanted a job at Twitter after a user expressed excitement about the possibility of Hotz and Karpathy working together.
“You want to come do ML for Twittter search? There’s a lot of low hanging fruit,” Hotz replied to tweet, looping Karpathy in.
Musk also said that Twitter is aggressively recruiting for engineering and sales positions, and that staff are encouraged to make references, as reported by The Verge.
This is after Musk said that there will be no more layoffs, according to Insider.
Jaw de Guzman is the content producer for Comms Room, a knowledge platform and website aimed at assisting the communications industry and its professionals.
