Meta’s former hardware lead for Orion is joining OpenAI

The former head of Meta’s augmented reality glasses efforts announced on Monday she is joining 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, the impressive augmented reality prototype that Meta recently showed off at its annual Connect conference. Kalinowski also led the hardware team behind Meta’s virtual reality goggles for 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. The reboot of OpenAI’s robotics team comes roughly four years after the startup disbanded its hardware research to focus its efforts on software. In 2018, OpenAI built a robot hand that could learn how to grip objects all on its own.

Several companies already are incorporating OpenAI’s models into their hardware. The most obvious is Apple, which will launch its ChatGPT integration for the iPhone later this year. Another is the robotics company, Figure, whose humanoid 01 robot leverages OpenAI’s software for natural speech conversations.