Meta AR Glasses hardware lead is joining OpenAI

Caitlin Kalinowski, who previously led hardware for Meta's AR glasses (including Orion), has joined OpenAI to lead the robotics and consumer hardware team. In her new role, Caitlin will focus on OpenAI's robotics work and partnerships to help bring AI into the physical world.

She mentioned in her LinkedIn post that AI is the most exciting engineering frontier in tech right now, and she is excited to be part of OpenAI's robotics and consumer hardware team.

Before leading various AR/VR hardware teams at Meta, Caitlin was part of Apple's Mac hardware design team. For about six years, she was responsible for designing various MacBooks.

Back in 2017, OpenAI had a robotics team working on both hardware and associated software. Later, OpenAI dismantled the hardware team to focus on other AI software, including large language models. Earlier this year, OpenAI again formed a robotics software team from other companies to help with robotics hardware.

OpenAI's job posting for a research robotics engineer revealed that OpenAI is seeking an individual skilled in "training multimodal robotics models to unlock new capabilities for our partners' robots, researching and developing improvements to our core models, exploring new model architectures, collecting robotics data, and conducting evaluations."

Earlier this year, OpenAI even participated in a funding round for the humanoid robotics company Figure. Hiring Caitlin, along with robotics engineers, and investing in Figure highlights OpenAI's clear interest in robotics. With Kalinowski's leadership and OpenAI's resources, it will be interesting to see how their robotics initiatives unfold.