One day you turn down a job at Tesla to work in the Autopilot segment, another day you agree to work for free on Twitter for Elon Musk. Such is the life of George Hotz.
Hotz is remembered for being the first hacker of the iPhone and the PS3 video game consolebut that pirate label will be in the past after taking on a new challenge on Twitter: a 12-week “internship” to fix the search function and remove the message that prevents you from browsing the service on the web without logging in.
According to a report published on the website of The Verge that this “work practice” came after Hotz supported Musk’s “extremely tough” ultimatum to Twitter employees, which required them to work “long hours at high intensity.”
Hotz said that “This is the attitude that builds incredible things” and that he would be willing to do an internship at the company. “Sure, let’s talk”, was the response of the also CEO of Tesla and SpaceX.
Hotz is already working on improving Twitter
The news of Hotz’s internship comes as Twitter is actively recruiting for engineering and sales positions after laying off nearly two-thirds of its staff in the immediate aftermath of Elon Musk’s takeover of the company.
Thousands were fired outright, while hundreds more chose to leave after the tycoon’s ultimatum about the company’s new “extremely hard” work ethos.
George Hotz, for his part, wastes no time: already working on fixes for the Twitter search function. In a tweet, he said this includes making it easier to find advanced modifiers of the search function and making the function less reliant on typing the exact text you want to find.
Okay, summarizing:
‣ Searching within “liked” and “seen” tweets with a modifier should be table stakes.
‣ The modifiers and advanced search should be surfaced a lot better. Discord does this well.
‣ Move away from exact text search and towards embeddings.—George Hotz 🐀 (@realGeorgeHotz) November 22, 2022
Hotz is coming off last month from Comma.ai, a driver assistance company. Before joining Twitter, he had announced a new software development company for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. Perhaps that will remain on standby after arriving at Elon Musk’s new house.