2024 has been a banner year for OpenAI. With the emergence of new reasoning models and lots of investment, the company is becoming a household name, even outside of the tech world. I’ve been seeing a lot of high-profile appearances by Sam Altman and other coverage talking about the potential for the firm that gave us ChatGPT, itself the most familiar model for most Americans.
Now there’s the news that one of Meta‘s top hardware people is set to start bringing her lunchbox to OpenAI as of early November.
Kalinowski Moves to OpenAI
Caitlin Kalinowski is supposed to be leading robotics and consumer hardware at OpenAI from now on – previously, she worked on groundbreaking projects, including Oculus for Meta, and designed MacBooks for Apple.
“I’m delighted to share that I’m joining OpenAI to lead robotics and consumer hardware,” said Kalinowski in press comments. “In my new role, I will initially focus on OpenAI’s robotics work and partnerships to help bring AI into the physical world and unlock its benefits for humanity.”
Former Apple staffer Jony Ive is also rumored to be working on an OpenAI hardware device focused on “an AI computing experience that’s less disruptive than the iPhone.”
OpenAI: Consumer Hardware and Robotics Plays
I’ve also seen that OpenAI has invested in Physical Intelligence, a San Francisco robotics startup that has generated a total of $400 million in funding at a $2.4 billion post-money valuation.
In addition, Jeff Bezos has chipped in, along with parties like Thrive Capital, and employees have joined the team from places like Tesla, Google Deepmind and Twitter.
This company’s mission statement is “bringing general purpose AI into the physical world.”
What will the next collaborative project look like?
Orion and Orion
Here’s a confusing piece of the new story – Kalinowski previously worked on an augmented reality project for Meta that was called Orion.
This Meta Orion is now a part of Meta’s recent legacy, with AR glasses that the company says “represent the future of wearables … weaving AI and AR into daily life” that will usher in “effortless multitasking and manipulating digital objects in three dimensions.”
Confusingly, the new model set to eclipse OpenAI’s o1 reasoning model is also named ‘Orion’ and is supposed to debut early next year.
So if you’re interested in either of these projects, separate the model from the consumer hardware device, and you won’t be turned around by the name repetition.
There’s some amount of hoopla over the possibility of OpenAI developing hardware:
“People were immediately excited by the news, with speculations over whether this would lead to an OpenAI robot or a more consumer-friendly device such as a pair of smart glasses,” wrote Christoph Schwaiger at Tom’s Guide.
Others are also getting involved.
“That success is also attracting some strong competition, as both Samsung and Apple are reportedly developing smart glasses of their own,” wrote Rael Hornby at Laptop Mag.
Certainly, if OpenAI is quick and successful at putting something like this together, it’ll be striking when the iron is hot: in my mind, what any executive wants is to be first to the party with something like this.
Let’s keep an eye on this set of developments as the company shakes up its executive team and continues to onboard talent for exciting new projects that everyone will know more about soon.
