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The decreasing size of Twitter’s personnel, which is said to be down to 2,300 from 7,500 when new owner Elon Musk assumed control, has received a lot of attention.
Many people are concerned about the random ways the firm has been downsized, even though we hypothesized that the most recent wave of departures was part of Musk’s grand strategy to decrease the company. For instance, Insider reported on Friday that Twitter’s payroll division was completely decimated last week when staff chose to resign after receiving a stern ultimatum from Musk.
The security hacker George Hotz, who is known for creating iOS jailbreaks and disassembling the PlayStation 3 before founding Comma.ai, a startup that develops driver assistance systems that aim to give other cars functionality similar to Tesla Autopilot, has apparently just joined Musk’s team on a temporary basis.
Hotz most certainly belongs to the group of individuals who wouldn’t appear on your Twitter bingo board. Musk and Hotz got into an argument after Musk purportedly tried to hire Hotz at Tesla but “kept changing the terms,” according to Hotz’s 2015 interview with Bloomberg. Hotz then established Comma.ai. Tesla at the time referred to Hotz’s audacious statements that his technology may surpass Autopilot as “very implausible.” Hotz immediately went out on a mission to disprove Musk and the rest of Tesla.
So why collaborate now? For starters, Hotz currently has some more free time. According to an early this month TechCrunch story, Hotz believes that some of his own work at Comma.ai is currently finished. It now offers a $1,999 driver assistance system developer kit that works with more than 200 automobiles; according to him, the company is also well-positioned to adapt its devkit into a finished consumer product.
He has a little room to maneuver thanks to the momentum. In support of the report, Hotz told TechCrunch, “I’m good at stuff during conflict. “I’m not great with hands-on work, so let’s gradually scale this up,” she said. “Do you want to manage a supply chain that can produce 100,000 gadgets annually?” Not really, I guess.”
Hotz, who is 33 years old, would possibly wish to show Musk his mettle once more. Indeed, Hotz tweeted last week that he would be “down for a 12-week internship at Twitter for the cost of living in SF” after expressing support for Musk’s offer to Twitter employees (Musk stated they could work “hard hours at high intensity” or accept three months of severance).
Soon after, Musk tweeted, “Sure, let’s discuss.”
I’ll put my money where my mouth is. I’m down for a 12 week internship at Twitter for cost of living in SF.
It’s not about accumulating capital in a dead world, it’s about making the world alive.
— George Hotz 🐀 (@realGeorgeHotz) November 16, 2022
The New Jersey has now officially begun his “internship,” the speaker announced today on the platform. It appears to be a demanding internship at that. Hotz is in charge of search for the social media company, as he explains on Twitter.
that’s what Elon told me my job was, and I will try my hardest to do it. I have 12 weeks
also trying to get rid of that nondismissable login pop up after you scroll a little bit ugh these things ruin the Internet https://t.co/vZbSfEqlfW
— George Hotz 🐀 (@realGeorgeHotz) November 22, 2022
Given the time commitment, he is half-jokingly setting achievable goals for himself. He said today that “[I]f I just get rid of the pop up I still consider my internship a win.” On my laptop, I have a chrome extension that blocks it. Reminds me of the Apple employee who quit after making Wallet automatically delete out-of-date boarding passes.
While Hotz is a relatively flashy new hire, Musk said today at an all-hands meeting at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters that the current strategy is to layer in talent. Musk reportedly stated during the meeting that there would be no additional layoffs.
The Verge reports that Musk also stated that employees are encouraged to make referrals and that Twitter is currently actively hiring for positions in engineering and sales. (The Verge points out that since Twitter’s entire public relations department was disbanded, getting confirmation from them is much more difficult.)
.@karpathy you want to come do ML for Twitter search? there's a lot of low hanging fruit…
— George Hotz 🐀 (@realGeorgeHotz) November 22, 2022
Hotz appears to be doing his part, which includes getting in touch with recent rivals to see if they’d be interested in working together on the turnaround. Andrej Karpathy, a former director of AI at Tesla who oversaw the computer vision team for Tesla Autopilot, was specifically questioned by Hotz about his interest in a job at Twitter today after Karpathy responded to a question Hotz posed.
Hotz’s inquiry? “How do you think Twitter search quality is? What may convince you to use Twitter search rather than Google? Karpathy’s response: “I use the site https://twitter.com to search for twitter on Google. works remarkably well.
