Caitlin Kalinowski
Caitlin Kalinowski is an American mechanical engineer and hardware product leader known for building consumer electronics at the intersection of hardware and AI. She spent over a decade at Meta leading VR hardware, driving every generation of the Quest and Rift headsets, and prior to that served as a technical lead at Apple on the Mac Pro and MacBook Air. From November 2024 to March 2026, she headed robotics and consumer hardware at OpenAI, resigning in protest of the company's agreement with the U.S. Department of Defense over concerns about surveillance and autonomous weapons. She holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University.
“There's a dawning realization, especially in the lab, that the acceleration is going so vertical that what you can do behind a keyboard with AI is going to saturate. When that happens, the next frontier is the physical world. Robotics, manufacturing, industrialization.”
Source→“Caitlin Kalinowski... OpenAI (built robotics and hardware division)”
Source→“There are some designs, and 1X NEO is a good example of this, that have made significant safety considerations in their designs and pulled mass inwards, essentially, which is a lot safer. Softer robots is safer.”
Source→“I have two, and I've purchased two more... They have a system which I think is SLAM based, which can see your room and make a map of it and identify which surface is which. And that, I believe, stays on the device so it doesn't go up to the cloud.”
Source→“Hey, Waymo saved lives. You know, you're going to have a fraction of the deaths using Waymo, whether you're a passenger or you're not. When you already see people in San Francisco adapting how they respond around a Waymo versus any other car, you're seeing behavioral changes that are based on trust.”
Source→“I actually think Pixar, Disney are probably the world's best at doing this type of design work, even though they haven't done as much in physical, in volume. If you look at what they do and how they show emotion, intent, approachability, engagement with their characters, they're really world class.”
Source→“One of the researchers that helped me the most, her name is Leila Takayama. She's an expert at this. And what she explained to me is that humans have a certain expectation about how other beings are going to respond when they enter a space.”
Source→“What I learned from folks like Shelly Goldberg at Apple now, who I think is a VP now, and Kate Bergeron when I was there at Apple is you need to do it right now. Anything you know you need to do, you need to do right now.”
Source→“John said that he was impressed that he learns from Steve Jobs, that there's a cabinet maker who finished the back of the cabinet and how important that was. And that goes very, very deep at Apple where every single design decision, even on the inside of the device is considered.”
Source→“Obviously she's a brilliant roboticist. And I'd love to learn more about what she's doing.”
Source→“Elon, I've heard, does very well is define the value of, you know, a gram of weight versus the cost... he's able to put numbers on what those ratios should be, which I think is really smart.”
Source→AI-extracted from podcast / newsletter / paper summaries. May contain errors.