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

“And I don't know that that works. I think that you need different types of robots to do different types of things. For example, if you've got a laptop and you want to put, you know, if you want to screw together the keyboard to the case, this is not a job I don't think for a humanoid. This is a job for a dedicated robot manufacturing robot that has been designed just to screw 10 screws into a case for this specific laptop. And you want to do that 10,000 times a day or something or 10,000 times a week or something. That's a dedicated robot that specifically intended to do that thing. And what I think is interesting here is you can have standard cabinet sizes for automation robots and you can have them be modifiable over time. And that's going to be a very interesting field, I think, is how do you make manufactured robots that are adaptable and changeable?”
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 think there's a hype cycle around humanoids that doesn't mean they're not extremely interesting. And I think there's going to be winners there. But what I hear a lot is I want a generalist robot shape to do everything.”
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
“Don't actually know what the latest, what FIFA is working on, but obviously she's brilliant roboticist, and I'd love to learn more about what she's doing. So I'll have to look that up. What I've seen is that what we have right now and what models we're building are going to be part of the solution, but not all of it.”
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
“May actually be able to do this in the future. And I suspect we may need those models to be the base of CAD and other physical engineering work. And so my frustration, and this is like a healthy frustration, is I want codecs for engineering. I want codecs for hardware engineering. And it's extremely valuable. And I've used a lot for other things, but I want it for my field. And so what I think it may require is new model types.”
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, and my big question is what is it going to take? So a lot of AI is based on LLMs, which are essentially word generators, word guessers. They're more complicated than that, but that's essentially what they're doing. And there's also video models that you've seen that are trained on video. But these models don't understand, they're not very good for what I need, which is I need to know, hey, you take a piece of paper, you fold it four times, and you do this, like, where's the hole going to be? Like when you open it back up, these LLMs and even video models, they don't know how to do that. They don't have the ability to understand friction or weight or contact pressure, friction, surface texture. Like they're just not able to do these things. And this is the core of what we need in engineering to be able to understand, to build things. So some world models.”
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
“AI in your strategy, your planning, your ability to think through the complex dependencies that you're facing. And that's what I use it for now, which is really high level planning, asking for information. Like when I look at who else is make a product like this, you know, I use AI to build the databases and they're not perfect, certainly a lot of times something's wrong, but it is so much faster. AI is pretty good in Excel right now. And of course, Excel is one of our favorite tools in engineering. So the ability to actually rapidly make Excel spreadsheets and change them is it doesn't sound sexy, but actually really speeds up the design process outside of these core pieces.”
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
“Tolerance stacks. We need them. How does seven parts fit together? And are they always going to fit together properly? But it's not fun. It's not the most fun part. Maybe for some of us, but not for me. And so doing these things, being able to do these things in AI would be amazing so you can focus on actually doing the fun stuff. Another good thing is PCB, a printed circuit board, has a lot of layers in the inside and then components that go on the top. And if you've ever ever opened anything like a calculator or a computer and looked inside, you know what I'm talking about, these printing circuit boards. It's increasingly looking like AI can route inside of these boards pretty well and it's looking like AI is going to be able to some basic component selection and layout on these boards. So that's kind of where we're at right now. So we're not in a point, Lenny, where day-to-day mechanical or electrical engineering like the meat and potatoes of it is being done by AI, but there's a huge amount that you can do as an engineer using.”
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 it's likely that at some point we will be there. This will be probably one of the biggest changes for my field that we have is being able to, I hope, do rapid design and increase the speed. Now, there's a lot of really fun things to do in CAD, but like in the beginning of my career, we had to do custom screws and we had to do the 2D drawings for everything. There's a lot of things in CAD that are not as fun.”
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, so I want to zoom out a little bit. So, most of the hardware work goes into prototyping into 3D CAD, so designing 3D parts and assemblies and components and making sure they work together properly. Then in making sure those parts and components can be made by a vendor at quantity that is possible and the tolerances we want, and then putting those things together. So that's kind of our process. Right now, we're right at the very, very beginning of AI being able to do CAD. So I'll give you an example. Claude can do what is essentially surfaces or point clouds. This is not RealCAD. Real CAD is, in my world, is dense, like it has shape, it has nerves, like you have an equation for how the surfaces work. And it's an entity that's designed in CAD. It's a solid entity. And so right now, we're not quite there with AI doing CAD.”
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 that's part of the calculus. When you move into mass production and the final design, it depends. I mean, if I could, I mean, if I was making Matic and I could buy an off-the-shelf wheel or an off-the-shelf component, I absolutely would and fit it in. But often what we're doing is highly custom because we have, again, one of those KPIs. I want to be this size. I want to be this weight. I want to be this color. And often off-the-shelf parts aren't good enough, not because they don't work, but because they're just not exactly designed for what we're doing.”
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
“Very simply, like, I use off the shelf whenever I can. Especially in the prototyping phases In the prototyping phases, which is a really important phase of what we do. Goal is to show that it can work at all. Like, can you get a thing working? So often it doesn't have to be the final pretty thing. It can be the ugly version. You can make an industrial design model of what the final thing is going to look like, but actually we call it works-like, looks-like models, where you have, this is what it's going to look like. And here's how it's going to work. And here's a working prototype. And humans are pretty good at this. As long as, and this is a pretty big caveat, what you show could fit into the industrial design. Sometimes that's not for companies that are younger, that's not always the case. But that's what we're going for. And so in the prototyping phase, man, whatever works off the shelf, whatever's fast, whatever you can get to quickly, and then maintain a sense of what's really going to fit in your final design, is it capable? Are the processes and components and materials capable of actually adapting to this size, this new weight that you need it to go into?”
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
“Well, when you look at what he did with Tesla and verticalizing his supply chain and famously actually Starlink is an even better example of this where I believe it's like effectively like ore and silicon chips in product out, that's a pretty incredible factory I've heard. I'd love to see it someday. But this is where verticalization comes into play because if you have verticalized and you have a lot of the components in-house or you're building a lot of things in-house, you can actually adapt to supply chain shocks better. And infamously, he did when the silicon itself was difficult to find. He was able to redesign his PCB in record time and adapt to buying new silicon. And that would be much more catastrophic for a company that had a more classic supply chain.”
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 again on the production line, test it again, do all the reliability testing. It is non trivial. And so this is why we care. So there's a hierarchy of components, often in consumer electronics. We start with silicon and the display, which are the longest lead time things, usually in my world, in robots, actuators are pretty tricky to get, even just for prototyping. Sometimes it takes a month or two to buy an actuator.”
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 imagine you're a vendor that sells you a component that's a die cast component goes out of business. You can get another diecast component in three months, maybe, and that quantity in five months or something like that at high quantity. This is recoverable. Your silicon goes out, if you can't buy your silicon, you can't buy your chip. Now you have to redesign your board and you have to find something else that might work. This is a catastrophic redesign. If you can't get the RAM you wanted in the form factor you wanted, this is what I call a, essentially it's a catastrophic redesign. You now have to redesign the entire guts of your product and then secure supply chain for these new things.”
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
“Silicon, they're going to have RAM, they're going to have PCBs. And if you take everything off of those things, like all the little caps off the PCBs and everything, then you're in the thousands of parts easily. So it depends on how you count. But this is not a simple device.”
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
“Doing the math in my head. They probably have between 50 and 150 parts. It's possible that they have more. I haven't seen their CAD, so I don't know what it's like inside their device. But they do have a lot of things going on, right? They have the wheels of the device that are obviously moving around. Then they have a vacuum, but they also have a mob. And obviously they have a vacuum bag. They have the reservoir that the liquid has to go in for the mob. 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, which is also what we did in BR as well. Which I think is a good practice for good privacy practice. And then they, of course, help wireless modules that connect up so you can communicate with your device. They're going to have an SOC.”
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
“Certainly, most of the products that I built, maybe all of them have had RAM, and we've had to figure out how to, for me, mostly it's a packaging issue. Where do you put it? Does it need to be accessible? Which RAM do you pick? How fast does it need to be? And what is the cost is usually our trade-offs.”
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
“Processing. Is it the way to think about it is like processing memory? So it moves very, you're able to kind of, you think about memory like on your hard drive or your solids day drive where you're keeping files that you're not using essentially in many cases or that you're dealing with maybe documents or pictures that you have. Maybe that's in cold storage on a server. Maybe that's using a hard drive somewhere. This is usually things that you don't need really, really fast access on. But if you're running a program, Some of that program is actually going to be run in RAM. And so there's different kinds obviously for servers. There's different kinds of server racks. Some server racks are actually focused on this type of memory and some server racks are focused more on what we consider like a cold storage or a slower. Now, this isn't my area of expertise, but”
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
“Actually, this is a great question, Lenny. I don't know what's going to happen. I think prices are going to double probably. I don't know on what timeline. If I knew what timeline the prices were going to double on, I'd be trading, which I'm not very good at. Like, I'd really be, I'd be doing a different job if I could predict these things. But certainly we're going to have a supply chain shock”
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
“Actually, not as cost sensitive as somebody in consumer electronics like Matic might be. And so they'll just pay for these higher costs. This is tricky and something we have to deal with all the time.”
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
“Let's see. This happened in COVID too. Okay. So, like, we had so many supply chain disruptions and getting enough memory was one of the challenges. So we had to pre-buy as well. I won't say who, but the company I was working with had to pre-buy memory as well. And so this is part of what I wanted to talk to you about today is these supply chain disruptions. And if a key component that goes into a lot of tech like memory or silicon is constrained, there's not much you can do. You either pay or you have already pre-bought enough that you can ride things out. And so those are the only real options. Obviously, there's a risk to pre-buying and the price might go down. And so the challenge is I think there's a latency with supply chain and something like memory where it can't adapt fast enough often to demand. Or there's a new category of product, or in this case, maybe data centers that are just eating up so much energy.”
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, we're in trouble as an industry. I think that, and I'm not an expert on this, but I think that AI has to do with why. And I also think that the supply chain is constrained. I have been advising startups and companies to pre-buy memory and to have enough memory in stock if they can afford it to ride out price spikes like anything in this category.”
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
“Because they haven't seen it. But if you show it to them, they will absolutely know that it's awesome and that is what they want. But if you get stuck in an iterative feedback cycle with your customers, it's very hard to go zero to one with something new. And so in my view, I don't know for sure. I didn't talk to him about this, but that's my view of what that means.”
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
“Customers don't know what they want because they haven't seen it. So a good example is the iPhone, which I didn't work on. But when you build a new iPhone with a touchscreen, you can't really go ask 100 people what they want because they're going to say a keyboard on their screen. And this is, I think, the ethos that you're getting at, which is, and this is true for anybody building new product with a new feature. And I've tried to build as much as I can teams that work on products that have something new about them, either they're a new category or there's a new manufacturing process or something that hasn't been done before. And when you're thinking about this, you can't really use what you learned from the same field and the same product class. Like it just doesn't work because you actually won't get the answer right. And I think this is actually what Steve was talking about, which is you can't get intuition if you're changing something fundamentally, like your customers won't know what they want.”
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
“Been a long time. I mean, I left we're a decade ago. Um, I don't know what they're doing now in terms of user feedback. I think this one gets misinterpreted, though, Lenny. I think that what is being said is if you want to build 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 didn't work directly on that keyboard. So I can't talk about what happened with it. But obviously, this is something that you got to get right. And I will say like the modern MacBook keyboards are awesome and excellent. And I don't know what happened with that. I don't think those were devices I was working on at the time.”
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 if my memory serves the very, very, very first MacBook error was a pretty low volume device that was machined but kind of had more of a proof of what could be done. And that was a manila envelope one, I think, where the side door opened out to give you the port and it kind of had a it had this shape underneath. And then the next rev of that was the MacBook Air that we know, which was essentially which is wedge shaped. Is different. And so the wedge shape is the one that I worked on and the one that went and hit more volume. But that Manila envelope one was the one that proved you can CNC a computer. And so they each have really important roles in the roadmap.”
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
“MacBook Air, it became very clear because we were machining it that there are certain features ambient light sensor that we just didn't make sense anymore. And so being willing to just jettison them for what we were going for, which was weight and size. If you have those overarching goals, you can actually make decisions, engineering decisions pretty quickly. And this is actually something that I think Elon, I've heard, does very well is define the value of a gram of weight versus the cost, or he does, I've heard engineering ratios essentially, and he's able to put numbers on what those ratios should be, which I think is really smart.”
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 VR display resolution or arc minutes, like how many pixels per degree do you want is actually one of the key metrics. So you need to understand what your key metrics are. And why is that key? Well, that's your visual field. So you think about retina displays on MacBooks. They figured out the KPI of what the human eye could see, probably overshot it a little bit, and built that. And then do you really need to keep as much engineering pressure up on the resolution of a display after that? Maybe not. So VR's not there yet. Not even close. So not in mass produced VR. We don't have Retina displays yet. So that is one aspect of pushing that up is one example. I think on a computer, obviously you're talking about clock speed. You're talking about how many parallel processes you can run. You're talking about weight. You're talking about price. And you're talking about features. So when we did the”
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
“Just don't, it's not even that you don't know what's around the corner. If you're working in hardware, you actually don't have more time.”
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
“Piece that's really critical if you're making hardware for folks out there who are trying to make hardware is you can't wait around ever. Like there's never enough time. So if you know that you need to do something, what I learned from folks like Shelly Goldberg at Apple now, who I think is a VPNO 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 because in two days there's going to be a surprise coming around the corner that you need that time to fix. And so this sense of stacking the things that you know you need to do and just getting them out of the way, even if you technically have more time, is this like kind of ruthless efficiency that I learned with 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
“Lot of people would start at the part they knew like, oh, we're gonna use this display, so I'm gonna put this in CAD and I'm gonna do all this other stuff. But the architects who are the best actually look at where are the pinch points, where is this going to fail? And they start to do the detailed design there first. And then a couple other points is the part that your customer touches or interacts with the most needs way more iteration than everything else. So easy on a computer, you touch the trackpad the most and then maybe the keyboard next. So those things have to be really good. They have to feel good. They have to respond properly. They have to be highly reliable. And then maybe the other pieces further out don't take quite as much iteration. So you have to boost your iteration on the things that people touch the most or interact with the most. So those are kind of some principles that I wrote about, but these are just things that you learn trying to build quickly. And the last.”
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 if you know what your goals are up front and you hit them, then you know you can ship. And often engineers, and I'm guilty of this too, especially on the hardware side, never feel like they're done. So this is a pretty nuanced thing. So that's one thing. The second thing is we tend to design the things that we know how to design first. And actually the right approach is to design the hardest parts first. One example will be, and there's no IP here, so I'm obviously not going to share any IP or anything internal. But at one point, we had to route cables through a hinge in a device, in a laptop we were making. And because it wasn't clear that those cables would fit, that's where the architect started. And he looked at the diameter and how to split the cables out and made sure that they would fit before finalizing the hinge design.”
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 iterate your design, that's another three months or four months or five months, or whatever it might be. And so you're trying to time the feature set with the quality, with the timing. And in hardware, timing is important because if you come out with your product a few weeks before your competitor, you might get all the PR. You might get all the interest. It's a pretty brutal. And so each of those days that you ship before your competitor is worth a lot of money. It might be worth $10 million to you. I'm making this up. I don't know. So you have to balance that with how many times you iterate.”
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
“Having your goals defined early and sticking to them is important. Hardware is not as adaptable to lots of changes throughout its development as Anything digital. And so if you set out to say, okay, we want to make something that's $300. And then halfway through, you say, oh, it actually has to be $150, you've almost burned a lot of that early time. So you kind of need to have a sense of having pre-thought out what you want and having those, I like to call them KPIs, but essentially goals written down and try to change them as little as possible. So that is very tough. In fact, that may be the toughest thing because if you do that properly and you have the right prioritization of those things, you know whether you can ship or not. You know whether you're done. And in hardware, one of the challenges is, you know, we talked about compiling four or five times. Every time you build.”
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 entire product essentially for cost, which then I think led to the highest selling VR headset of all time. And it was not easy because you had to, in our case, remove cameras, remove components, change materials, change manufacturing processes. But when you have alignment that you want to get this to more people, and the way to do that is to reduce the cost, then that kind of drives everything else. And it was still a very high quality product with great, I think, low return rates and it was a very strong product, maybe even stronger than if we hadn't done that, funny enough, but it hit our price point.”
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 example is the Quest 2. So we reduced the Quest 2 price quite a lot. And what we had to do is understand what are we trying to do? We're trying to democratize VR. We're trying to get VR to more people. And the only way we could do that is reduce the price. And so what it required is a redesign.”
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 the message is understanding why you're doing what you're doing. And then every design decision supporting that goal. That requires a lot of detail and requires a lot of persistence, and that requires a lot of consistency. But understanding why you're doing what you're doing and what the end goal is, is I think the key and letting that expand into not only the software in the UX, but also 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
“You might know this, Lenny, who were hacking PlayStations or Super Nintendos into portable backpacks. And so there was an ethos at the company that was actually quite good for the DNA of a hardware team. And then I was on the meta side when we did the acquisition. And when we acquired them, they had that spirit of rapid iteration. They had made Crescent Bay before the acquisition, I think. But then to professionalize that, get the yields up and get the volumes up was the cost down was kind of the challenge we faced in the first rift.”
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
“Lead on the first MacBook Pro and then over time worked to lead successive iterations of the MacBook Air and the cylindrical Mac Pro. But I was lucky enough to work with these folks and learn from them who'd been doing this for a really long time. So you have to take those lessons. And then when you leave, try to distill them and explain them to a new community. Now Oculus was actually a hacking hardware startup. Oculus started from folks.”
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 this isn't just an aesthetic decision. What it does is actually force the engineering industrial design operations community there to think about what are we really doing and what's the core of what's happening for this part, for this assembly, for this consumer product, then what really matters and what happens is if you're that methodical, what really matters tends to rise out and look very simple at the end. And so part of what you're seeing in many folks coming from that era is an understanding of how to do that, which, you know, in the very beginning of the Mac side, Macs didn't sell as many and the quality wasn't quite as high. But by the end of that era, Macs were very popular and selling in much higher volumes. And so I think that made a big difference. And I was only a small part of that. Like I was, you know, the thermal.”
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
“What are the key outcomes we're looking for? And actually, John Turnus talked about this, I think, a few days ago where he talked about the back of the cabinet. I don't know if you saw this video, but basically 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.”
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
“Also taught me, and a lot of other people actually, if you look at kind of the era that I was there, I was very, very lucky because if you look at the other folks who were there, I was there between 07 and the end of 2012. If you look at the other people who were there working on these things, they actually have a lot of key positions now across the industry. And I attribute that to how good Apple is at training people to think about complex interdependent decisions and risk. And I don't think I realized that they were doing that at the time. But if you look back what you see is a real dedication to hardware excellence, the proper process to go through and do really good experiments in hardware and figure out what the best outcome is. But there's something underneath that which is understanding the first principles of why are we building it this way.”
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 Apple has been best in class at this. There's a bunch of reasons. One, hardware is a first-tier citizen at Apple. There's a lot of companies where hardware isn't part of the core product development conversation as much. But that's an exception.”
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
“Okay, you're shut down. Like, it was so funny, no matter how careful you are with these things, like, you just can't really, we're not at a place.”
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
“My open class story is I have. I sandboxed it so it's on its own computer. But I gave it like three things. I gave it like my real email address and my, I don't know what it was. I gave it like some information about one of my accounts or something like that. And I added it to the social media. Like, I can't remember what it's called, the open claw social.”
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
“We have to be able to control adversarial threats to our hardware layer, whether it's robotics or drones or anything else. And that's going to be a huge part of the future of warfare.”
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, and I think we need a lot more of them. You know, I've chosen not to work for companies that create lethal technology. But I think that it's good to have people who are willing to do that. And I think that it takes everyone kind of to build the future that we want.”
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, America is really good at figuring these things out. We have a pioneering kind of independent spirit and a great engineering culture, but we need to move.”
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 these are important components of the military, but it's an old way of thinking of hey, we have this and we have this and we have this and our planes come off here. It's like, no, AI is changing everything and military technology is changing incredibly fast. And the place to look at that is Ukraine, where drones are being changed and updated every day rapidly with 3D printing. And this is, I think, the future of where war is headed, unfortunately. And I view this as a very different era that we're entering into with very different. This isn't new to anybody, but this is, you're looking at what it costs for them to send out a missile and what it costs for us to stop it. And this is just you have to do the math every time. And right now we're losing on the math, which is fine for a certain amount of time, but the longer it goes, the less fine it is.”
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