Notorious hacker George “geohot” Hotz created some buzz after his self-driving car/machine learning startup ‘comma.ai’ came out of stealth mode last year. Hotz released an email conversation he had with Tesla CEO Elon Musk in which he was offered a contract with a “multimillion-dollar bonus” for him to build a new Autopilot system for Tesla.

Hotz refused the offer and said that he could build a self-driving car system himself. He then reportedly made a bet with Musk that his system, which he installed in an Acura, will beat a Tesla Model S with Autopilot on Interstate 405 in Los Angeles. At the time (Dec 2015), the hacker said that he would release a video of the challenge “in a few months”.

We have yet to see that video, but now it looks like the rules of the challenge have changed.

comma.ai is not just Hotz working alone in his garage anymore. It was revealed last month that the startup secured funding from high-profile VC firm Andreessen Horowitz — potentially bringing the startup’s valuation to $20 million.

The news was confirmed this week when the fund reported leading a $3.1 million investment in the company.

Now comma.ai and Hotz has taken to Twitter to challenge Musk and Tesla again:

https://twitter.com/comma_ai/status/717766827950997506

The new challenge is to build the first vehicle that can autonomously navigate San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge without human intervention. According to the Guardian, Musk hasn’t responded.

While still talking about Musk and Tesla, Hotz followed up:

“I think we can maybe build better self-driving cars. He can build a better rocket.” It’s not clear why Hotz keep making it an “us versus them” thing with Tesla, but it could have something to do with the fallout he had with Musk over the offer to work at Tesla (Hotz claims that Musk changed the terms of the agreement throughout the process). Hotz’s license plate on comma.ai’s test car: Either way, Tesla doesn’t agree. When Hotz first made his statement about “crushing” Tesla’s and its partner Mobileye’s Autopilot system, Tesla responded with a statement: “We think it is extremely unlikely that a single person or even a small company that lacks extensive engineering validation capability will be able to produce an autonomous driving system that can be deployed to production vehicles. It may work as a limited demo on a known stretch of road — Tesla had such a system two years ago — but then requires enormous resources to debug over millions of miles of widely differing roads.” Hotz said that he doesn’t expect Tesla to acknowledge his Golden Gate Bridge challenge. We will have to wait and see, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Tesla’s Autopilot has already been able to easily handle the Golden Gate Bridge – any Model S owner in the SF willing to try and report back?

Featured image: Bloomberg by Peter Bohler

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