OpenAI hires Meta’s former Hardware Lead for Orion
OpenAI confirmed to TechCrunch that Caitlin Kalinowski will be joining the startup. 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 was responsible for the development of Orion, Meta’s impressive prototype augmented reality that it recently showcased at its Connect conference. Kalinowski led Meta’s hardware team for virtual reality goggles from roughly nine years. Before that, she worked at Apple, designing the hardware for MacBooks.
“I’m delighted to share that I’m joining OpenAI to lead robotics and consumer hardware,” said Kalinowski in her 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 unlock its benefits for humanity.”
Possibly, 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. In September, Ive confirmed 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 started hiring research engineers for a robotics team that’s aimed at helping OpenAI’s partners incorporate its multimodal AI into their hardware. OpenAI has reactivated its robotics team, four years after it disbanded their hardware research in order to concentrate on software. OpenAI created a robot that learned to grasp objects on its own in 2018. Apple will release its ChatGPT iPhone integration later this year. Another is the robotics company, Figure, whose humanoid 01 robot leverages OpenAI’s software for natural speech conversations.
