Caitlin Kalinowski, who used to lead Meta’s efforts on augmented reality glasses, announced on Monday that she will be joining OpenAI to head up their robotics and consumer hardware projects. OpenAI confirmed this news to TechCrunch.
Kalinowski has a lot of experience in hardware. She took charge of Meta’s AR glasses team in March 2022 and was responsible for the creation of an impressive AR prototype called Orion. Before working at Meta, she spent about nine years leading the team that developed Meta’s virtual reality goggles, and even earlier, she designed MacBooks at Apple.
In her LinkedIn post, Kalinowski expressed her excitement about joining OpenAI, where she’ll initially focus on projects related to robotics and partnerships, aiming to bring AI into the real world for the benefit of everyone.
There’s a chance she will collaborate with Jony Ive, a former Apple executive and now part of a startup called LoveFrom, as they create a new AI hardware device together. In September, Ive said he was working on a product with OpenAI that aims to offer a less disruptive computing experience compared to the iPhone.
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OpenAI has also started looking for research engineers to build up its robotics team. This comes about four years after the company decided to stop its hardware research to focus on software. In 2018, they created a robotic hand that could learn to grip objects by itself.
Many companies are already using OpenAI’s technology in their hardware. For instance, Apple plans to integrate ChatGPT into iPhones later this year, and a robotics company called Figure is using OpenAI’s software in their humanoid robot for natural conversations.
