Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple)

**Caitlin Kalinowski** (0:00)
There's a dawning realization, especially in the lab, 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.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:14)
You're living in the future and designing it.

**Caitlin Kalinowski** (0:16)
There's probably more change in war than there is in consumer electronics in the next two years. We need to invest a lot more in drones than in aircraft carriers.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:25)
Just imagine 100,000 drones coming out of China just at us.

**Caitlin Kalinowski** (0:29)
I do feel that we need to re-industrialize the country significantly to be safe in a military sense. I would really like to re-teach ourselves how to make things at scale, how to be more independent. People that are your allies now may not be in the future.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:42)
You worked with some of the most legendary, successful builders. Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman.

**Caitlin Kalinowski** (0:48)
Sam is really good at saying, why not more? Why not 100x or 10,000x? You're thinking too small. For Steve, the bar he held for the company, for technical talent and for excellence, was not wavering.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:01)
What does it take to create a robot that feels human and connected?

**Caitlin Kalinowski** (1:05)
If you walk into a room and a robot is just like, like it's creepy. You want these devices to be non-threatening, appear soft, reactive to you. Pixar, Disney are probably the world's best at doing this type of design work.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:18)
There's a media called Memory Prices that are coming for consumer hardware and robotics and physical AI.

**Caitlin Kalinowski** (1:23)
We're in trouble as an industry.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:27)
Today, my guest is Caitlin Kalinowski. Caitlin is one of the most sought after and accomplished hardware leaders in Silicon Valley. She was part of the original Unibody MacBook Pro teams and technical lead on the MacBook Air and Mac Pro at Apple. She led the AR Glasses hardware team at Meta, including the team behind Orion, their most advanced AR product. Before that, she ran the VR hardware team at Meta, where she helped design all of their incredible VR devices like the Rift and the Quest. Most recently, she was at OpenAI, helping build their robotics and hardware division from scratch.
Robots and hardware and physical AI are so hot right now. Every AI company and so many startups are launching building AI hardware products, and Caitlin has been at the center of this emerging field for decades. This conversation goes in a lot of different directions, many that I did not expect, and I hope to do a lot more episodes on the hardware side of building over the next few months. Before we get into it, don't forget to check out lennysproductpass.com for an incredible set of deals available exclusively to Lennys Newsletter subscribers. With that, I bring you Caitlin Kalinowski.
Caitlin, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

**Caitlin Kalinowski** (2:38)
Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:41)
We're going to go in a bunch of different directions. I'm going to bounce around. I want to talk about VR. So much money, so many resources, so many smart people have been working on VR for so long. Meta spent, I don't know, $10 billion. They renamed the company Meta to lead into VR as the future, this metaverse that we're going to be living through.
Feels like a lot of people are leading out now. Feels like Meta stepping back, Apple stepping back with the Vision Pro. In spite of the incredible hardware that everyone, that you built, that your team built, just like I've got a couple of the devices, it's just like a magical experience that you've, unlike anything you've ever experienced still has not caught on.
What happened? Is there still a future where VR catches on? Or is the future kind of AR and something else?

**Caitlin Kalinowski** (3:22)
I don't think I would have guessed exactly what happened here. But the way I look at it is VR helped us understand how to orient things in space relative to a simulated world and the real world and connect those two. We figured out SLAM, which was how to do positioning in space using cameras. We figured out a lot of depth, applications of depth sensors. We figured out how humans perceive visual data in space, and all of that actually, while it's great for VR and I think VR gaming's really interesting. It is a niche, but I think it's an interesting niche. What I see now is in robotics, all of these technologies are being used. Because you need to understand how the robot is moving through space, you need to understand how far it is from everything, you need to understand if you're wearing a VR headset and driving the robot. It's the same real technology. For me, I view it as a step in a long technological arc. To be honest, as someone who's not using VR a lot right now, I'm really glad that we did it, but I expected it to be big, obviously, or wouldn't have been working on Oculus.