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Caitlin Kalinowski oversaw the development of Meta’s augmented reality glasses that were announced five years ago.
The former hardware lead for Meta’s augmented reality (AR) glasses has announced that she is joining the tech start-up of the moment, OpenAI.
Caitlin Kalinowski, who also worked on Oculus VR and previously designed hardware for Apple’s MacBooks, oversaw the creation of Orion, the AR glasses prototype that Meta showcased in September.
In a post on LinkedIn yesterday (4 November), Kalinowksi said she will be leading the ChatGPT-creator’s robotics and consumer hardware development.
“OpenAI and ChatGPT have already changed the world, improving how people get and interact with information and delivering meaningful benefits around the globe,” she said.
“AI [artificial intelligence] is the most exciting engineering frontier in tech right now, and I could not be more excited to be part of this team.”
In her new role, Kalinowski said she will initially focus on OpenAI’s robotics work and partnerships “to help bring AI into the physical world and unlock its benefits for humanity”.
The news regarding Kalinowski’s appointment is the latest is a string of movement at OpenAI.
Just last month, Microsoft’s former vice-president of AI research left the Windows giant to join the start-up. Sebastian Bubeck, who is a former assistant professor at Princeton, had been with Microsoft for more than a decade.
Meanwhile, a number of OpenAI’s co-founders and leaders have left the start-up in recent months.
In September, the company’s chief technology officer Mira Murati, research VP Barret Zoph and chief research officer Bob McGrew all announced their departures from OpenAI – the day the company announced a structural shift from a not-for-profit to a for-profit company.
While earlier this year, OpenAI co-founder John Schulman and former executive Jan Leike announced their departures to join Anthropic, a rival AI company.
Co-founder Ilya Sutskever resigned from the company in May to start his own safety-focused AI company and Andrej Karpathy, another co-founder, left the company in February to work on founding an AI education start-up.
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