According to reports, the former head of Meta’s augmented reality glasses division announced on Monday that she was joining OpenAI to lead robotics and consumer hardware. post on LinkedIn. OpenAI confirmed to TechCrunch that Caitlin Kalinowski will join the startup.
Kalinowski is the director of hardware and in March 2022, she began leading the Meta AR glasses team. She oversaw the creation of Orion, the impressive augmented reality prototype that Meta recently unveiled at its annual Connect conference. Kalinowski also led the hardware team behind the Meta virtual reality headset for about nine years. Previously, she worked at Apple, designing hardware for MacBooks.
“I am excited to announce that I am joining OpenAI to lead robotics and consumer hardware,” Kalinowski said in her post. “In my new role, I will initially focus on OpenAI’s work in robotics and partnerships to help bring AI to the physical world and unlock its benefits for humanity.”
Kalinowski will likely work with his ancient boss, former Apple executive Jony Ive, on a up-to-date AI hardware device that OpenAI and Ive’s startup, LoveFrom, are building together. In September, Ive confirmed that it was building a hardware product using OpenAI, describing it as “a product that uses artificial intelligence to create a computing experience that is less socially disruptive than the iPhone.”
OpenAI also recently launched started hiring research engineers for the robotics team which aims to facilitate OpenAI partners implement multimodal AI in their hardware. The relaunch of OpenAI’s robotics team comes about four years after the startup ended hardware research to focus on software. In 2018, OpenAI built a robotic hand that can learn to grasp objects on its own.
Several companies are already incorporating OpenAI models into their hardware. The most obvious is Apple, which will introduce ChatGPT integration for iPhone later this year. Another company is robotics company Figura, whose humanoid robot 01 uses OpenAI software to conduct conversations based on natural speech.