Caitlin Kalinowski, the former leader of Meta’s augmented reality (AR) glasses initiative, announced on LinkedIn that she has joined OpenAI to head its robotics and consumer hardware division. OpenAI confirmed her new role to TechCrunch.
Kalinowski, a seasoned hardware executive, began managing Meta’s AR glasses team in March 2022. During her time at Meta, she played a key role in developing "Orion," the AR prototype showcased at Meta's recent Connect conference. Kalinowski also led Meta’s virtual reality hardware team for nearly a decade. Prior to her work at Meta, she contributed to hardware design for MacBooks while at Apple.
In her LinkedIn post, Kalinowski expressed excitement about her new role at OpenAI, where she will initially focus on the company's robotics projects and partnerships aimed at bringing AI into real-world applications for broader human benefit.
Kalinowski may also reunite with former Apple colleague Jony Ive on an AI hardware project. In September, Ive confirmed he was collaborating with OpenAI on a product envisioned to create a computing experience with fewer social disruptions compared to smartphones.
OpenAI has recently been recruiting research engineers for its revived robotics team, which will assist partners in integrating OpenAI’s multimodal AI with hardware. This marks OpenAI’s return to robotics, after initially pausing hardware-focused projects in 2018 when they developed an autonomous robotic hand capable of gripping objects.
Several companies are already embedding
OpenAI’s models into their products. Apple, for instance, is set to launch
ChatGPT for iPhones, and the robotics company Figure is using OpenAI’s software
to power natural language interactions with its humanoid robot, Figure 01.
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