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

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 gonna saturate. When that happens, the next frontier is the physical world. Robotics, manufacturing, industrialization, living in the future and designing it. There's probably more change in war than there is and consumer electronics in the next two years. We need to invest a lot more in drones than in aircraft carriers. Just imagine a hundred thousand drones coming out of China just at us. I do feel that we need to reindustrialize 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. You work with some of the most legendary successful builders. Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman. Sam is really good at saying why not. More why not a hundred X or ten thousand X? You're thinking too small. For Steve the bar he held for the company for technical talent and for excellence was not. Wavering. What does it take to create a robot that feels human and connected? If you walk into a room and a robot's just 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. There's a media called memory prices that are coming for consumer.

hardware and robotics and physical AI we're in trouble as an industry. Today, my guest is Caitlin Kalenowski. 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.

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