‘The Tiny Corp’ Launched by Original iPhone Hacker ‘Geohot’

George Hotz, the iPhone hacker pioneer (also former amateur rapper and PS3 jailbreaker) and renowned tech entrepreneur, announced on Wednesday the inception of his latest venture, The Tiny Corp. The new company has successfully raised $5.1 million USD in funding and is set to revolutionize the AI computing landscape.

Hotz, who has previously made headlines with his groundbreaking work on self-driving car technology at Comma.ai, is now focusing his innovative prowess on the world of artificial intelligence (AI) computing. The Tiny Corp’s mission is to commoditize the petaflop, making high-performance computing more accessible and affordable, thereby challenging the dominance of large entities in the AI computing space.

The company’s first project is to develop a new software framework, runtime, and driver for AMD chips. Despite their potential, Hotz believes these chips are currently underutilized in the machine learning (ML) space due to subpar software support. The Tiny Corp’s short-term goal is to get AMD on the MLPerf list, a benchmarking competition for ML models, using the company’s own framework, tinygrad.

Tinygrad, initiated by Hotz in October 2020, has already made a mark in the inference space and is poised to become a formidable competitor to PyTorch. The framework is designed to be simple and efficient, offering a PyTorch-like frontend that seamlessly connects users to the hardware without the complexities of Turing completeness.

The Tiny Corp plans to generate revenue by selling computers at a profit. If successful, the company will be at the cutting edge of non-NVIDIA AI compute, potentially disrupting the current market dynamics and driving down prices.

Hotz is currently recruiting software engineers to work on tinygrad. He invites those who are eager to work hard and contribute to something extraordinary to join the team in San Diego.

“It’s been 6 years. I started another company,” said Hotz on Wednesday afternoon. He previously spent a short stint working at Twitter after Elon Musk acquired the social network.

With the launch of The Tiny Corp, Hotz is taking a significant step towards his vision of a world where everyone owns an AI, both for training and inference, and where compute power is available from a multitude of companies all competing to drive the price to zero.