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The former head of Meta’s augmented reality headset efforts announced Monday that she will join OpenAI to lead robotics and consumer devices, according to Post on LinkedIn. OpenAI has confirmed to TechCrunch that Caitlin Kalinowski will be joining the startup.
Kalinowski is a hardware executive who began leading Meta’s augmented reality 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 that created Meta’s virtual reality headsets for nearly nine years. Before that, I worked at Apple, designing hardware for MacBooks.
“I am thrilled to announce that I am joining OpenAI to lead robotics and consumer devices,” Kalinowski said 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 unleash its benefits for humanity.”
Kalinowski will likely be working with her old boss, former Apple executive Jony Ive, on a new AI-powered device, which OpenAI and Ive’s startup, LoveFrom, are building together. In September, Ive confirmed that he was building a hardware product using 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 I started recruiting research engineers for the robotics team This aims to help OpenAI partners integrate multi-modal AI into their devices. The reboot of OpenAI’s robotics team comes nearly four years after the startup dismantled its hardware research to focus its efforts on software. In 2018, OpenAI built a robotic hand that can learn how to grasp objects on its own.
Many companies are already integrating OpenAI models into their devices. The most obvious is Apple, which will launch ChatGPT integration for the iPhone later this year. Another is robotics company, Figure, whose humanoid robot 01 leverages OpenAI to conduct natural speech conversations.
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