Meta Former head of AR glasses efforts heads to OpenAI Caitlin Kalinowski is joining the company and will lead robotics and consumer hardware. According to LinkedIn, Caitlin Kalinowski said on Monday that she'd joined OpenAI.

Kalinowski is a hardware executive who began leading Meta's AR glasses team in March 2022. She headed the team that developed Orion, the pretty impressive augmented reality prototype Meta recently unveiled at its annual Connect conference. Kalinowski also ran the hardware team working on Meta's virtual reality goggles for about nine years. Before that, she worked at Apple, designing the hardware for MacBooks.

"I am excited to share that I'm joining OpenAI to lead robotics and consumer hardware," Kalinowski wrote in her post. "In my new role, I will first focus on OpenAI's robotics work and partnerships to help bring AI into the physical world and unlock its benefits for humanity."

Perhaps Kalinowski will be working for her former boss: Jony Ive, the legendary former Apple executive- in a new AI hardware gadget that the startup is designing with LoveFrom. At the time of last September, Ive told The Information that he was indeed designing a hardware product with OpenAI; described only as "a product that uses AI to create a computing experience that is less socially disruptive than the iPhone".

OpenAI also recently started looking for research engineers for a robotics team aimed at assisting OpenAI's partners in getting its multimodal AI onto their hardware. The restart of OpenAI's robotics team comes roughly four years after the startup disbanded its hardware research to focus efforts on software. In 2018, OpenAI built a robot hand that could learn how to grip objects all on its own.

Several companies are actually incorporating OpenAI's models into their hardware already. The most obvious one that comes to mind is, of course, Apple and its ChatGPT feature, which is launching soon for the iPhone. Then, there is the robotics company called Figure, whose humanoid robot, 01, comes with OpenAI's natural speech conversations software.