YouSaid · the spoken record

Caitlin Kalinowski

lines on the record: 130
first: 2026-05-17
most recent: 2026-05-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“So, I have a website, which is my name.com. I'm almost on LinkedIn. People can help me. I think helping imagine the future. This is not a single player game. This is a multiplayer game. Figuring out what future we want. Right now we're in this dystopian niche where everything's just, you know, it feels like the future is horrible. And the way to not have that is actually design there own future together, figure out what we want our future to look like. Paint a picture in fiction, in literature, in conversation, and then build that and I think that that's possible.”
2026-05-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I find reading and communicating with AI is very helpful on the basics, but then understanding what was happening culturally and what the significance of the work is is it isn't adequate”
2026-05-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To Greek tragedies, I just didn't have enough context to learn what I wanted to learn, and just reading them, I didn't have enough uptake. So I found an incredible postdoc who was willing to tutor me and I just get to ask him all these questions. He's an encyclopedia. He knows everything. I could ask him what was happening in Turkey at the time of this Greek, you know, this tragedy that we're reading and like what was happening in Athens and like what this tragedian might be responding to and he can answer the question. It's really fun to have the ability to have that sounding board.”
2026-05-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is like very nation nerd territory, but I found this list that the poet Joseph Brodsky wrote, which is a list of English or a list of things you should have read in order to have an intelligent conversation in English. And it is like an affected list. Like it's intense. It's like the Old Testament, Gilgamesh, and then all the way down through. But what I found is it's a pretty good distillation of what we used to call the Western canon. And actually, I learned a lot in my public school education and college, but I never really learned from what you would consider the Western canon. And so this is kind of in addition to that, there's some more newer books on the list. I find it just fascinating to have something to work off of. And what I found is as I got into specifically the tragedies.”
2026-05-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have you seen that branch where there's all these branches and then you're here? And then there's all these branches from this point Yeah, you know who it was from. I didn't know who it was from. This is what I think about it a lot because it's very hard not to get stuck in the future or the past and stay kind of here. I have trouble with that. But that is a great reminder that, you know, you get to pick every day. You get to decide every day what you want to do. And sometimes things don't go the way that you want. And sometimes you regret what you did or sometimes you're proud of what you did, but it doesn't really matter. What matters is what's right in front of you”
2026-05-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I really like Volabac, the clothes. They make really interesting clothes. They're essentially basing their new clothes on material science. So they take new material science and make them into clothes. It's just a fun brand to follow. V-O-L-E-B-A-K.”
2026-05-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a melodrama. I think you have to think about it as a soap opera, and then it's fun. If you think about it too literally.”
2026-05-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really into euphoria right now. I think the new euphoria, I'm interested in the characters and figuring that out what's going to happen there.”
2026-05-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've been mostly reading the classics lately. So Book of the New Sun is a great fiction book, which I really recommend. I think that's what it's called. I haven't read it in a little while. I love Mrs. Dalloway. Actually, I think it's a very interesting book about. Transitions and it was a post war book by Virginia Wool. So I really love it. And I think it's really wonderful. I think Herodotus' histories is pretty incredible. He's wrong a lot, but he's also, it's the first history book. And in many cases, he's going and finding firsthand or secondhand accounts of what happens. It's a way to look into the world at a completely different era than it is now. So these are some books that I like. And I'll double check the title of first one and email you, but I think that's what's called.”
2026-05-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This new way of work is scary, but if you embrace it and are daily using these AI tools right now and daily applying them to what you're doing, you'll be at the forefront of whatever comes next. And so I just want to encourage everyone to be creative, use these tools, have fun with them, figure out what the boundaries are. And then every time a new model comes out, test again because it's really important to know what we're dealing with and where these boundaries are. But I'm also I've never been more excited about the power of an individual.”
2026-05-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that this is probably one of the most exciting times we're coming into, and it's normal, I think, for all of us, myself included, to be worried and scared about it. But I also think it's an opportunity for people to do. Extraordinary amount, have an extraordinary amount of progress and be able to as an individual do more than we've ever done before. And so that's the side I'm trying to embrace. These new tools.”
2026-05-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The fact that I don't remember probably means it's okay. I think we addressed it, we redesigned it, we had to change the material in the bracket. I think we had to make steel to hold the tolerance we needed, but it worked out and the price, the cost Yields were fine. So I think we adapted.”
2026-05-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it turned out that actually the new design was better because with a favored pair, you have source of truth for the space. And then the other two cameras overlap onto that source of truth. And so it worked well. I thought it was a good outcome, but it was a scramble and certainly wish that we caught it four months earlier.”
2026-05-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is it stands for when we compile the hardware For the first time with everything that's supposed to be done. So final components, final materials, you're making the components on the tools. You're going to make them for mass production instead of just machining them. So it's a big deal. And so what we had to do was favor or prioritize. We had four floating cameras. We had to lock the bottom two to each other and put them on a bracket so that the relative distance from them met the speck that he needed and then let the other two float. So this was an architectural change. And this was a failure. I mean, it was a failure in understanding the spec. It was a failure in essentially the product design, but it was because of a misunderstanding of the spec. And so we were able to adapt. We actually kept the build on time and we actually shipped the product on time, but it was really stressed.”
2026-05-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Their interpretation of our spec and our interpretation of our spec was different. So in engineering, you usually use a plus or minus. Like it can go up or down by, in this case, I think it was 0.15 mm or something like that. And in his world, he was used to having a global, it's within 1.5 mp, a 0.15 mm. And so we had a different interpretation of the spec. Now, the problem is that our interpretation of the specment that he couldn't meet his goals of being able to understand where the headset was in space. And so we had to do a redesign. And this is at EBT. So this is pretty much when you want the engineering to be done.”
2026-05-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is a great question and not a comfortable one. One of my favorite failures was actually on the quest one. It was around EBT, so halfway through the quest one. And we found out that we had gone from five cameras to four for cost reduction. We talked a little bit about this. We needed to reduce the price so more people could buy them. And what happened was it was right before Christmas. And I heard from the lead on the team that does computer vision. And he said, oh my gosh, the cameras, the data from the cameras isn't working and we can't get a lock on where the person is using the headset. And so we looked into it and we realized that”
2026-05-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know. And I think that that's why I'm looking for this zero to one. And so when you're looking for a zero to one opportunity, it's always going to be in some place different.”
2026-05-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The way that the hardware organization interacted with the rest of the company, it was very clear this is what we're going for. We're going to have this review. We're going to make a decision in this review. If you can make the decision without the review, you will do that. Here are the objectives for this project. It was really well executed. And I think that's hard to do at a fast growing company. It's very hard to do at that level. And having him and Andrew Bosworth, the CTO involved in the technical decisions, able to read reports that were maybe 20 pages long grock the trade-offs, understand them and be able to contribute to the technical discussion. And that's just on my thing that week. And they're doing that, you know, a hundred times that month was impressive and definitely something I learned from them.”
2026-05-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think that he, I have to say, he ran a company very, very well. So the way that the technical side of the company operated. Way that we had reviews that decisions were made The decisions were made at the lowest level possible in the company to maintain speed. I underappreciated how clean and well-run the hardware.”
2026-05-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He held for the company and for technical talent and for excellence was not wavering. It was not up here and you were either going to meet it or you weren't. And that was something that kind of washed through the whole company. When you are a young, ambitious person and you hear that something's not good enough, that can be extremely motivating, actually. And like, you know, it's not, it doesn't quite hit the way you would think. And if you tell somebody, hey, this needs to be better, like you need to spend more time on this. You need to be more thoughtful about this or this is not hitting our quality bar in your catarvy or something. That's impactful. And I think you never want to hear that again. So it's very, very motivating. And then Mark Zuckerberg.”
2026-05-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Start with Sam because most recently Sam is really good at saying why not more? Why not 100x or 10,000 X you're thinking too small why not think about this bigger? And every time we talked about something important he talked about that and what I realized is I was thinking too small in certain areas and he was thinking globally And having that nudge from a leader who's ambitious is really helpful, I think. So that was that was a big thing that I learned from him about he's willing to he's willing to go for it at high volume and invest depending on meaning not high meaning hitting a lot of people you know he's willing to think in very big numbers that was really really foundationally important I think for Steve it's Steve Jobs is just the bar”
2026-05-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so having a sense of all pulling for the same direction is really important. I rely a lot, Lenny, on my gut feel for people assuming everything else that I'm looking for has been checked. So it's hard to talk about what that means, but usually it's that spark that you're looking for in someone that they're genuinely motivated. They're motivated by a desire to learn and by excellence. They're motivated to learn from the people around them. They're open to updating their point of view based on new information. And they want to win. I mean, these are the things that really matter when you're building a team.”
2026-05-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then, what we didn't talk about, of course, is mission alignment. Which actually unifies a team. So if everyone coming in is aligned to the mission, that helps a lot because especially in the world of AI researchers and hardware folks, there's a lot of miscommunication.”
2026-05-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't see it that way. I think we need them. I also think that. We need to build new technologists There's the obvious question what happens if we don't have teams that have senior and junior people? But I think what you find when you actually build these teams is you have to have both. You must have both. The team size just might be a little bit smaller than it used to be. When this AI revolution in hardware happens, I don't know how that's going to affect the teams. That will be really interesting to watch.”
2026-05-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I remember a freshman year at Stanford. We had the first data, like databases that you could access and you could share movies on, I think, is what we did and music on or whatever it was. But this was new. And so we were native in these things. And that gave us a lot of oomph in creating new technologies for it. But we have to accept that we're not native in these new technologies and you really want some folks who are hungry and excited and want to learn who do have these skills.”
2026-05-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Natively that it's like baked into their engineering process are 20 years old or 21 years old or 20, I mean, it's very hard to find someone who's in their 30s who can be truly fully AI native. And so we need these folks to teach us how to think. And I've had the opportunity to work with a few folks in that age range. They're approaching their problem solving completely differently because they're using AI from the ground up for everything. And they're much faster actually. And it's really fun to watch. So figuring out how to get these AI natives to teach us, the rest of us, how they think about AI when it's, you know, we are, you and I, I think I can say, are digital natives where we grew up, maybe there wasn't internet when we were really young, but we are the generation that had the first internet. We were teenagers and we are the generation that had the first cell phones really in scale. And we are an important generation because we had the first.”
2026-05-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the nice thing is actually in robotics, self driving cars, autonomous vehicles is a really good place to look because you've got the sensing stack and you've got a lot of the safety trade-offs actually and it's a lot of the hard engineering, the hardcore engineering. So that's a place that I looked. Obviously you want some hardcore roboticists who can do robot design from scratch. And these are really people, even though they might have a degree in something. They're really hybrid people. They're generalist people. So one of the key principles I'm looking for is a lot of really strong generalists who can adapt what they've learned in other fields to a new field. And people with a lot of experience building. You want some people who have experience building the thing that you're building that's new. And some people who have experience scaling other things to higher bonds. So you need to look at that. And then with young people, this is where it gets really fun. Lenny is the only AI native people, essentially who use AI so”
2026-05-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'm lucky that I've had a lot of time, a lot of reps basically on hiring people. And so I have a strategy of hiring great people. When you're hiring for zero to one and new things or new industries, and that's what we're facing, I think, with AI and robots, certainly it's very new. You can't count on having entirely people who've done the exact same thing in past lives because it doesn't exist. The exact same thing doesn't exist. Maybe you've got roboticists who've built a thousand robots, but nobody that I'm aware of has built the type of robot that can move through the world the way I'm interested in in the millions because it hasn't been done. So you have to start thinking about how do you build a team that can do something new.”
2026-05-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wish I could say, you know, Lenny, part of the fun of our job is we get to see things before everybody else does, but part of the flip side of that is we can't talk about anything internal or any IP. What I can say is the team's really strong. And I was really, really grateful for the opportunity to help. But I also thought that after what happened happened, it was time for me to, I couldn't continue to work there because you don't know what's going to happen next time. And my hope was that my decision made it easier for other folks to talk about what their boundaries were and hold them and, you know, we'll see what happens there.”
2026-05-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With friends and feel like what they did isn't good and isn't right. And that's where I ended up. And that's what I tweeted about. It was going to get reported on. So I tweeted before that happened.”
2026-05-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I hope. So, what I said in my tweet was that I. A lot of friends in the executive side of OpenAI that I care a lot about. I think they're really good people And I feel that what happened with the decision making, the speed of the decision making, the governance, and the lack of defined guardrails around the announcement of the Department of Ordeal is not how I thought it should have been done. And both of those things can be true. And so my hope, Millennium, was that there's a third path. You see a lot of people just kind of going along with what their company is doing. And then you see some people that are kind of scorched earth about it. In this case, that didn't make sense for me. I didn't feel that way about the company. OpenAI isn't an amazing company. And I was able to help build a robotics program there and kind of attract some of that top talent in robotics, I think in the world. And so I have a lot of, I don't know, you know, this is a group of people I care a lot about. And you can also disagree.”
2026-05-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Especially when democracy is at stake. I mean, I think that we are, and I don't want to be like, you know, on a high horse or something, but I do think that we're in a place where we need to think about things in the future in these terms and defend these things with our capabilities while also hoping that we never have to have hot conflict anywhere.”
2026-05-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. So, this is just going to continue happening. And I think we're just going to. Continue to feel like we live in the future. But Safety is going to be a big key for robotics, I think. I think there's probably more change in war than there is in consumer electronics in the next two years, for example.”
2026-05-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Affect our economy and our work, but it seems like the physical world is less likely to change as quickly outside of drones, self-driving cars. You're going to see more and more robots, but I'm not somebody who says, I'm not somebody who thinks that in five years you're going to have 20 million robots. I don't think that it's going to be that fast. I think we have a lot of really deep work on supply chain we do. supply chain reliability raw material access and then we need to figure out how to make factories again in this country for high tech so that's a lot of work but in the interim you're going to start seeing a lot of weird things on the street you might see robots on the street you have you seen any delivery robots in in your world lenny before”
2026-05-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About all these things going wrong. So, this is kind of an interesting disagreement inside of me of like what I want the future to look like and what I think it's going to look like and what it's actually going to look like and trying to guess. And so it seems pretty clear to me that AI is going to have a foundational change in how we work and what we do over the next couple years, especially you're already seeing it. Obviously, anybody who codes is not coding by hand very much anymore. Any knowledge work this is going to hit next, I think, and progressively.”
2026-05-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, in this job, we have this wild thing where we have to try to live in the future, and we have to try to live in the future far enough away that we can design something not only for two years from now or three years from now, but also something that will ladder up to what we want six years from now. Because in my field, it's a lot easier to make something and iterate on it and iterate towards a final goal than to do a one-shot thing perfectly. So not only do you have to have a sense of what the first thing needs to be like and look like, you have to have a sense of what the third thing ideally or the platonic ideal of the thing will eventually look like. So you do have to think about the future and live in the future. I have this weird thing where I love to think about the future, but I'm also a skeptic. And you really want me to be a skeptic because if I think everything's going to be fine, the hardware's not going to work. You really want me to be like, this isn't going to work and this isn't going to work and this isn't going to work. And just like be like kind of worried.”
2026-05-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I had that happen once. You almost want a little two arms in the front to do like gesturing or like you go or something. It's amazing how much we actually rely on.”
2026-05-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there's a big difference in my mind. This is like a big categorical difference. There's a big difference between a car that is safer, that drives itself versus a car that a human drives. Because you have an existence proof of the human driving car and you have the data. When you talk about homes, what is the delta? You have now a thing that you didn't have before doing things. So if it's like bad at it, like what are you relating it to? And if it's unsafe in any way, like what are you relating that to? It's a much harder equation in my mind to get to a lot of people than a car where you can say, hey, way more saved lives. You know, you're going to have a fraction of the deaths using a way more, 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. So you're seeing behavioral changes that are based on trust, which is really cool. When you're talking about a new product that hasn't existed yet and it's not essentially replacing”
2026-05-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, never going to take Waymo, took one Waymo, and now never wants to take anything else. So definitely willing to update her position, but it has to be pretty good. So she's in love with the Matic. You know, it's amazing. And so, but the bar is pretty high. So I think in order to have a home robot, it's going to have to be pretty incredible for us to be willing to have it in our home. But I take that as a challenge.”
2026-05-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'm into it. My partner, not so much. So I'm very lucky to have a partner who's got a high bar, which means, you know.”
2026-05-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, 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.”
2026-05-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To intentionally or to show their intent before they do something. And so one of the things I learned is if a robot just suddenly turns and does all this stuff, it scares you. But if a robot looks before it turns and then goes, it's much less alarming. So there's all these little pieces, and I recommend anyone to go look at her work. There's a lot of great research here about how to not necessarily with a humanoid, but how to have any robot both Respond properly in a social context with someone entering a room or exiting a room, but also transmit its intent physically. That doesn't surprise you”
2026-05-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you walk into a room and a robot's just like it's creepy and it's easy to be creepy, I'm a little surprised with some notable exceptions how creepy a lot of these humanoids are right now. You want, I think, these devices to be non-threatening, generally speaking. You want them to appear soft. You want them to appear reactive to you. You want to have a sense that they know that you're there, that they're attentive to you. that they're there to help you and make your work life easier. And you also expect”
2026-05-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great question. So, I'm new relatively speaking to robotics. And so I had to learn as much as I could, as fast as I could. And one of the researchers that helped me the most, her name's Layla Takayama. She's an expert at this. 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. You really want to, you know, when someone walks into a room, you kind of acknowledge them. You might not talk to them, but you kind of look up. There is a lot of very complex nonverbal cues that we give to each other”
2026-05-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. And one really great idea I think would be to have an AI system that can go on prem, so be inside of a data center that the company owns, and then train it with their data. That, I think, could work eventually in the future. But you need a lot of this CAD data. So you're going to need a base model that has a lot of CAD data. We'll have to figure out how to do that. That's going to be very interesting. And then we're going to have to figure out how to put it inside safely inside essentially the walls of companies and have them then train it on their own data. I don't know if that's going to be like the equivalent of an MCP layer or what that's going to be, but this seems doable in the long term.”
2026-05-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Start. And then probably the big incumbents are going to be slower because they have dedicated tools and a lot of IP privacy.”
2026-05-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it will be happen. The biggest challenge here, Lenny, is actually the data. This CAD data is some of the most valuable IP that anybody has. And Samsung or Matic, to pick on Matic, they're not going to want to give their 3D CAD to a model vendor, to model maker, somebody make an AI model to teach it how to make great CAD. This is proprietary. This is like the secret sauce. And so where is this data going to come from is a big question I have, which is why I think hobbyists are a more interesting place to start where they're not concerned about the sanctity of their CAD and where it goes. They don't care. They want to make something and they want to help making it faster. So this is kind of where I'm interested in this starting, which is, you know, maybe a hobbyist isn't an expert in printed circuit board design. Maybe they don't care. They just don't want their drone to be fast and to beat this other guy's drone or whatever. This is where I think you're going to start seeing all this.”
2026-05-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you're talking about robots building robots that are different than them, usually, like, yes, I think that that's going to happen. But it's like The terms matter. I don't think there's going to be one robot that's going to build itself. I don't think that that's what it's going to look like. But yeah, having AI be able to, if you could say, hey, I want to build this thing and I want it to do this. And like, this is kind of how I want it to look. And here's a picture. The idea that you could, even as a hobbyist, go from a 2D picture to complex 3D CAD to assemblies, to communication with vendors of how to make those parts and getting their feedback, to iterating on that and doing a couple builds. Like that is possible, I think, in the future. Will it be good, as good in the beginning as us doing it? No.”
2026-05-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The raw board is going through and getting reflowed and getting checked, and the whole thing is being done without humans, unless there's something goes wrong and a human runs over and fixes something. So in assembly, mechanical assembly, the same thing. These most advanced lines, they don't have people working very much. They used to have 200 people. They might have 10 now. And so we've already kind of moved past human labor in a lot of this most advanced manufacturing. And so we don't actually need to replace humans with humanoids. We just need more of these dedicated robots. So my suspicion is we'll have humanoids for some long tail things that we need to do that humans are currently doing that will be important, but we'll also have robots that are for construction, robots that are for electrical work, robots that are for”
2026-05-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You wouldn't want a humanoid to do that. And so when you really go and look at a modern manufacturing facility like in China, at the top tier of tier one suppliers, there's not very many people on the line anyway. The entire printed circuit board line is essentially got no people on it anymore.”
2026-05-17 · Lenny's Podcast · Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source