Positivity
TLDR
- George Hotz reflects on why things are genuinely good: open AI research, sustainable companies, and a decent world.
Key Takeaways
- Models that would have displaced Google a decade ago now run on a laptop; the cutting edge of AI research is open source.
- Hotz’s two companies, comma and tinygrad, ship continuously, employ talented people, and sell hardware profitably.
- He frames both missions around a decentralized, post-cloud future where users own their own compute.
- He contrasts the ease of fake education with the equal availability of real education, citing math YouTube channels and the Riemann Hypothesis as examples.
- Personal life is described as good but kept private; he separates online persona from inner life as a deliberate long-term practice.
Why It Matters
- A founder running profitable hardware companies explicitly credits open-source constraint as a creativity driver, not a limitation.
- The post frames US-China competition not as existential threat but as a multipolar world where both are livable, a notable contrast to standard tech discourse.
- Hotz mentions his quadratic sieve improved and expresses anticipation for a polynomial-time factoring algorithm, signaling continued personal work in cryptography-adjacent math.
the singularity is nearer · 2026-04-23 · Read the original
