George Hotz, a famous iPhone and PlayStation hacker who once turned down a job at Tesla, has started a three-month “internship” at Twitter, run by Elon Musk. Hotz said that his priority at the social network is to fix the search function, as well as to remove the window that does not allow you to browse the service without logging into the system. In 2015, Hotz discussed working for Tesla, but the plans fell through as Musk kept changing the terms of their deal.
The opportunity came after Hotz expressed support for Musk’s “extremely tough” ultimatum to Twitter employees, which required them to work “long hours at a high intensity” or leave the company. Hotz said that “that kind of attitude creates incredible things” and that he was willing to do an internship with the company. “Sure, let’s talk,” Musk replied.
George Hotz is already working on fixes for Twitter search. In a tweet, Hotz said they include making it easier to find advanced modifiers for the search function and making the function less dependent on entering the exact query text.
Okay, summarizing:
‣ Searching within “liked” and “seen” tweets with 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 toward embeddings.— George Hotz ? (@realGeorgeHotz) November 22, 2022
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Hotz appears to be on hiatus between big projects right now, having left driver assistance company Comma.ai late last month (though he was quick to announce a job at another AI chip software company). In his resignation letter, Hotz suggested that Comma.ai needed a different style of leader as the company tries to transform itself from a startup to a sustainable consumer-focused business.
The news of Hotz’s “internship” comes as Twitter is actively recruiting for engineering and sales roles after laying off nearly two-thirds of its staff immediately after Musk bought the company. Thousands of employees were fired immediately, hundreds of others chose to leave after Musk’s ultimatum about the company’s new “extremely hardcore” mode of operation.
Elon Musk has said that he no longer wants to be the CEO of Twitter, Tesla or any other company
Source: The Verge
