The former leader of Meta’s augmented reality glasses team announced Monday that she is joining OpenAI to lead robotics and consumer hardware, according to a post on LinkedIn– in. 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, an immersive augmented reality prototype that Meta recently showcased at its annual Connect conference. Kalinowski also led the hardware team that created the Meta virtual reality glasses. Before that, she worked at Apple, designing hardware for MacBook computers.
“I’m pleased to share that I’m joining OpenAI to lead robotics and consumer hardware,” Kalinowski said in her announcement. “In my new role, I will first focus on OpenAI’s robotics work and partnerships to help make AI part of the physical world and unlock its benefits for humanity.”
It’s possible that Kalinowski will work with his former boss, former Apple CEO Jony Ive, on a new AI hardware device that OpenAI and Ive’s startup, LoveFrom, are developing together. In September, Ive confirmed that it was building a hardware product in collaboration with OpenAI, describing it as “a product that uses AI to create computing that is less socially disruptive than the iPhone.”
OpenAI also recently began hiring research engineers for the robotics team, which aims to help OpenAI partners integrate its multimodal AI into their hardware. The reboot of the robotics team comes roughly four years after the startup disbanded its hardware research team to focus efforts on software. In 2018, OpenAI built a robotic arm that could learn how to hold objects on its own.
Several companies are already integrating OpenAI’s models into their hardware. 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 uses OpenAI software for natural conversations.
The post Former leader of Meta’s hardware team for Orion joins OpenAI appeared first on ITNetwork.
Source: www.itnetwork.rs
