For almost two days he managed to fool a large part of the Tesla world. From Friday evening in the US, the previously little active Twitter account @armanthehacker began to divulge alleged internals from the autopilot development at Tesla, and did not stop at criticism of CEO Elon Musk. This immediately aroused suspicion, but because the information sounded well informed, a majority seemed to believe it. But only until Sunday: A Tesla observer realized that the alleged autopilot insider had given a clearly wrong answer to a technical question – and shortly afterwards @armanthehacker was no longer on Twitter.
Alleged Tesla insider reveals himself
On Friday evening, when Tesla in the US was about to distribute a hotly anticipated software version, @armanthehacker had initially stated that Musk should not stir up such high expectations – most customers would not receive the update until the weekend. He also provided information in advance about the new Safety Score that actually came with the software – Tesla uses it to record some risk factors when driving in order to decide who will be included in the beta test with the new autopilot version called FSD. And the Twitter user, who has since disappeared, said that Tesla would need new computer hardware for truly autonomous driving.
That sounded convincing – even if the direct contradictions to statements by CEO Musk were in some ways unheard of. As it turns out, @armanthehacker just seems to have listened carefully and speculated a bit. Deviations from his announcements about the upcoming beta button for the FSD application and the status of the new software for it, he explained with changes at the last minute. And according to CEO Musk, Tesla does not necessarily need more powerful hardware for autonomous driving, but still wants to develop a new generation of its special chip for it (also called FSD) to increase its lead over human drivers.
He deleted his account shortly after I caught him making a bogus statement a genuine member of the Autopilot team would never have.https://t.co/SJB7NDtmPU pic.twitter.com/6tH5tk6ghr
— ???????????????????? ???????????????????? ???? (@truth_tesla) September 26, 2021
Other Tesla observers apparently still didn’t leave the alleged internals in peace, so they dealt intensively with the Twitter history of @armanthehacker. And indeed there was a message from him last July in which he wrote that he was only 14 years old. In it he described himself as an electrical hobbyist and asked a well-known Tesla mechanic for parts donations. At about the same time it was also noticed that he had made a technical mistake in a recent answer on 3D pixels (voxels). Shortly after he was informed of this, his Twitter account disappeared along with the news (see screenshot above)
Twitter world misled
So it should be clear that there was only one braggart at work here, albeit a well-informed and also very young one. In any case, @armanthehacker lived up to its Twitter name – many understand hacking not only to be the skillful exploitation of technical loopholes, but also human weaknesses. It looks like a youngster misled large parts of the Twitter world for almost two days. Perhaps he could list that as a special achievement if he should actually apply to Tesla.
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