Recently, a significant personnel appointment has caused a major stir in the tech industry. According to the latest news from LinkedIn, Caitlin Kalinowski, who was in charge of Meta's AR glasses business, has officially joined OpenAI as the head of robotics and consumer hardware, a move confirmed by TechCrunch.
Kalinowski, a prominent figure in the hardware field, boasts an exceptionally impressive resume. During her tenure at Meta, she led the AR glasses team from March 2022, spearheading the highly anticipated AR prototype project, Orion. Prior to that, she had overseen the VR headset hardware team at Meta for nine years. Earlier in her career, she also worked on MacBook hardware design at Apple.
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"I am thrilled to announce my joining OpenAI to lead the robotics and consumer hardware division," Kalinowski stated in her post, "In my new role, I will initially focus on OpenAI's robotics projects and partnerships, working to bring AI into the physical world and bring more benefits to humanity."
Of particular note is the possibility that Kalinowski may collaborate with her former boss, the former Chief Design Officer of Apple, Jony Ive. It is reported that Ive's startup company, LoveFrom, is working with OpenAI to develop a new AI hardware device. Ive revealed in September that this product would create a "computing experience with less social interference than the iPhone."
Meanwhile, OpenAI is recruiting research engineers for its robotics team, aiming to help partners integrate its multimodal AI into hardware. This marks a resumption of hardware research by OpenAI after a four-year hiatus. As early as 2018, the company developed a robotic arm capable of autonomous learning to grasp objects.
Currently, several companies have begun to integrate OpenAI's models into their hardware products. Apple plans to introduce ChatGPT integration features for the iPhone later this year; robotics company Figure is using OpenAI's software to endow its humanoid robot 01 with natural language dialogue capabilities.
These moves suggest that OpenAI not only aims to dominate the software field but also has ambitious plans to redefine the future of human-computer interaction through hardware products. Could this mean a technological revolution comparable to the advent of the iPhone is imminent? Let's wait and see.
