The former head of Meta’s augmented reality glasses business announced Monday that he would join 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 showcased at its annual Connect conference. Kalinowski also led the hardware team behind Meta’s virtual reality goggles for roughly nine years. Before that, I worked at Apple designing hardware for MacBooks.
“I’m excited to share that I’m joining OpenAI to lead robotics and consumer hardware,” Kalinowski said in his post. “In my new role, I will initially focus on OpenAI’s robotics work and partnerships to help bring AI into the physical world and realize its benefits for humanity.”
Perhaps Kalinowski will collaborate with her old boss, former Apple executive Jony Ive, on new AI hardware devices that OpenAI and Ive’s startup, LoveFrom, are building together. Last September, Ive confirmed that he was building a hardware product with OpenAI, describing it as “a product that uses AI to create a computing experience that is less socially disruptive than the iPhone.”
OpenAI also recently began hiring research engineers to its robotics team to help OpenAI’s partners integrate multimodal AI into their hardware. The reboot of the OpenAI robotics team comes about four years after the startup disbanded its hardware research to focus on software. In 2018, OpenAI created a robotic hand that could learn to grasp objects on its own.
Several companies are already integrating OpenAI’s models into their hardware. The most obvious one is Apple, which will launch ChatGPT integration for iPhone later this year. Another company is Figure, a robotics company whose humanoid 01 robot leverages OpenAI’s software for natural voice conversations.
