The former head of Meta's augmented reality glasses efforts announced Monday that he is joining OpenAI to lead robotics and consumer hardware, according to a post on LinkedIn. OpenAI confirmed to TechCrunch that Caitlin Kalinowski will be joining the startup.
Kalinowski is a hardware executive who began leading Meta's AR glasses team in March 2022. She oversaw the creation of Orion, an impressive augmented reality prototype that Meta recently unveiled at its annual Connect conference. Kalinowski led Meta's hardware team developing virtual reality goggles for about nine years. Before that, he designed MacBook hardware at Apple.
“I’m excited to share that I’m joining OpenAI to lead in robotics and consumer hardware,” Kalinowski said in the post. “In my new role, I will initially focus on OpenAI’s robotics efforts and partnerships to help bring AI to the physical world and unlock its benefits for humanity.”
Perhaps Kalinowski will work with her old boss, former Apple executive Jony Ive, on a new AI hardware device that OpenAI and Ive's startup LoveFrom are building together. It will be. In September, Ive confirmed that he was building a hardware product using OpenAI, describing it as “a product that uses AI to create a less socially disruptive computing experience than the iPhone.” .
OpenAI also recently began hiring research engineers for its robotics team, which aims to help OpenAI partners incorporate its multimodal AI into their own hardware. The reboot of OpenAI's robotics team comes about four years after the startup disbanded its hardware research to focus on software. In 2018, OpenAI developed a robot hand that can learn how to grasp objects on its own.
Several companies are already incorporating OpenAI models into their hardware. The most obvious is Apple, which plans to launch ChatGPT integration for iPhone later this year. Another company is robotics company Figure. The company's humanoid robot 01 leverages OpenAI's software to enable natural voice conversations.