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 Palmer Lucky is a friend of mine, and we don't agree on everything, but I do think that we agree on some important aspects of how we need to respond here. I think he's right to say that we need to invest a lot more in drone.”
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
“Reteach ourselves how to make things at scale, how to make things at quantity, how to process raw materials, how to be more independent so that when COVID happens again or something else happens again, we're not in trouble and we can't and we're not unable to protect ourselves.”
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 mentioned drones. It's another good example. You need essentially the same technology to make the rotor spin on a drone as you do to make an arm move on a robot. It's essentially the same base technology and supply chain. So we need to, at least on the military side, have an independent supply chain as much as possible. I think that's important. I think every other country should do that as well. But I don't think that's specific to us. I do feel that we need to reindustrialize the country significantly in order to be safe in a military sense. You really never know what's going to happen in the future. And people that are your allies now may not be in the future. The Allied West, I think, is going through a lot of geopolitical changes. There's a lot of shifting. And so I would really like to.”
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 it's a great question. So, you have a ring of magnets that are polar opposites, and they go like this around the ring, and then you have, you know, you have something in the center that rotates. And the way it rotates is you have alternating current, essentially. And so the magnets make the rotor spin.”
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 might be. It might so if we can't get the magnets, then we have to design new actuator types that are maybe use different materials that may be larger that may not be as efficient in space. So that's important. And then the actuators themselves are important because if for some reason we can't buy them, then we don't get to make robots. So it's foundational. There are some foundational technologies like this, all backed by material science, essentially breakthroughs. There's batteries, of course. There's actuators. The raw parts like the die cast parts, the machine parts are less critical. We think we can get those. But we're, I think everyone, not just in this country, but around the world is starting to think about supply chain because you have these disruptions, whether it's COVID or war, and you see how quickly things change.”
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
“There's design and AI that's made in Asia, but that's essentially where things have been for a long time. And in order to have a safe supply chain, we need to start to work on having some independence in these layers and these stacks.”
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, the way to think about it is you can start with raw materials and magnets is a good place to start. So, we need to be able to get the magnets, the raw magnets, for example. Then we need to be able to process them. Then we need to be able to integrate them into actuators and build the actuators around them. That we need to be able to integrate those actuators into subcomponents or robots themselves. And each layer of this chain has essentially been outsourced over the last 25 years to countries like China, like Japan like Korea. And so full transparency, I've been part of that transfer of engineering knowledge to Asia in Asia, the expertise has historically been scale and being able to build a lot of these parts at lower prices. We've had this kind of deal across these borders that this is how we're going to operate for the most part. Now, of course, there's things we make in this country still. And of course.”
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, the actuator is the motor. So you put power into it, electricity into it, and you get motion out of it. Most of these robots have a rotating rotor essentially that then has gearing on it that then powers the limb or powers the head or the fingers or whatever else. So they can be small, they can be large.”
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 is going to be something that I hope that we can talk about a little bit more. But every single part that goes into that robot's coming from somewhere and many of these parts may become more restricted or difficult to make. And it may be harder to assemble the subassemblies and the meaningful parts of the robot here in this country. So there's a very complex supply chain dependency right now on robots like humanoids, but also other robots that we have to figure out. And a lot of people are trying to move production here to the United States, which is very challenging because we don't have great actuator companies here yet, 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
“At skill is the problem in my mind. At scale is a huge challenge. Now, for me, my background, at scale means millions usually, but let's even say hundreds of thousands. You've got to get a good design that's running. Then you've got to make it reliable enough that it can keep running day to day to day without a lot of human intervention or repair. And that's its own problem But the first problem you have is 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
“Continued Easier to manufacture higher yield and safer. And I think this is what's going to happen next. So they're not quite in my mind. They're not quite ready yet. I even get a Chinese robot that can do all kinds of things for you. But if you look at the booklet, it says, hey, you can't be within three feet. No human can be within three feet of this robot. And you're not going to see very many robots that are strong enough to do meaningful work that don't have that warning right now.”
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 part that might hit you, which in this case might be the arm. It's lighter and softer. There's two aspects. You have the arm moving through space, and then you have the actuator that's rotating. So you have to add up the M energy essentially for both of those things. And so that's an impact thing that you have to worry about. Then you have to worry about the compliance of the arm. If it's just hard, then the impulse is high. But if it's soft and compressible, then the impulse is lower. And so you really have to be thinking about this when you have robots around people. So in my world, in my worldview, the humanoid robots are still prototypes and they're advanced prototypes. What we need to do is show that this works at all, which is kind of where we're at right now. Once we have working prototypes, then usually, at least in my field, what you do is you compute.”
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 might be close. I have many others safety concerns about large, strong humanoids operating right next to people because we have to have enough data to show that that's safe. 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.”
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
“Can see the end of that tunnel. Now, I don't know when it's going to be again, but we can see that that's going to saturate at some point, or at least people think it will. And when that happens the next frontier is hardware, the next frontier is robotics, manufacturing, industrialization, the sensing layer in the real world, the ability to move objects in the real world, and eventually we hope space.”
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 I'm seeing in the AI world in San Francisco there's a dawning realization, especially in the labs, I think, that the acceleration is going so vertical that you can do behind a keyboard with AI is going to saturate. I don't know when it's going to saturate. Nobody else knows either. But when that happens, the next frontier is the physical world. And so, what I see happening is the lab's big tech startups are all realizing at the same time, okay. This is coming. We're going to have complex systems that can solve problems in the digital world very, very quickly. We already have them. They're going to get better and more comprehensive and more capable. If you think about that as a frontier,”
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
“On any different part of the device, you have a curve. You're in the plus and minus three sigma or more So, meaning. You have two parts that go together, you're going to get the smallest version of this one and the largest version of this one, and you're going to have to put those together across the board. People don't think about this that much, but the part variance is pretty high. And so we've got to solve for that last half a percent in the process of building so that when we compile our last time, when we build our last time, it's done and we're not going to have, we're going to have a high yield, we're going to be able to make them and make money on them effectively. We won't have very many returns. And so that's kind of the game that we're playing.”
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 if you're building hardware, you redesign it in CAD, you know, for every major build. And then you have to release it. And once it's released, you compile it the last time, you release it for mass production. If it's a mass production device, that's it. You're done. You can't ship over there updates. So we have a different approach. We have to have a different approach, which is more conservative. You have to do more of the reliability checks and tests in line with the program because once you compile that last time, you're done. You make all the parts. You put them together. They're out in the world. The only alternative is, you know, is to ship something new to replace it a couple years later. And so we have to be more conservative and we have to take our time. Because if you think about it, a product that says sells millions, if you have a graph of all the parts put together.”
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 like to talk to computer science folks about it this way. So computer science folks, as you know, they write code and then they compile the code off it and then they run the code and debug it. But they can compile their code every day, you know, every hour, whatever they need to do. In hardware, we only get to compile our code, quote unquote, like four or five times”
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 very odd. Everyone is suddenly asking about hardware and robots and the physical world. And it's never been the sexy career. It's always been the thing that you went into because you loved it. It never paid the same as these other careers. It was never kind of at the forefront of how we talk about things with the possible exception of Apple, obviously, and the hardware lineage at Apple. So it's great in some ways and it's very odd in others.”
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 AR, you're going to just start getting more and more larger and larger displays. But the great thing about Orion is you got 70 degree field of view binocular. So with the prototype, you got to sense what this is really going to be like in the future. It's very hard to describe how it feels to use a pair of glasses like this, but when you do, you suddenly are like, oh, like I feel immersed. The field of view is wide enough. I feel immersed and it becomes pretty clear that I think I think this is part of where the future is headed.”
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
“Manufacturing, like all of these technologies are going to need the same piece parts, the same pieces that we built in the AR VR spectrum.”
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
“Orion, the AR glasses we worked on, I worked on most recently, are a bit ahead of their time because they're using waveguides and micro LEDs that are not quite ready for mass production. The yields just aren't there. The cost is still high. I think that's absolutely a path that airglasses are likely to take. And as we figure out the input to those glasses, like how do you communicate with them when you're on the move, when you're in public? How do you communicate quietly, silently with them? I think once we start to figure out some of those challenges that having a display that's mostly off that you can turn on when you want it to be on seems like part of the future, so that's part of it. The other part is there's this lineage of technology going through VR and then AR and now in I'm using the term robotics physical AI, but you really have to step back and look at autonomous vehicles, drones, obviously robots, autonomy period.”
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 believe in AR glasses as part of the future because. I do think looking down at your phone all the time is not great for us as social creatures. So if you can maintain social connections and get information, that's where I think we're headed.”
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
“View it as a step in a long technological arc. And to be honest, as someone who's not using VR a lot right now, I'm really glad that we did it, but I don't think it, I expected it to be big, obviously, or wouldn't have been working Oculus. And I think maybe the social aspect of having something in front of your face is part of why it didn't take off. And I think that we learned, of course, with Google Glass how important that is as well. And so when we tried to make it social, it's hard to make it social when you have, you know, your face covered.”
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 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 is a really interesting, it is kind of 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. And so for me, I...”
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. 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.”
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
“Sam is really good at saying why not more? Why not 100x or 10,000 X? You're thinking too small for Steve, the bar he held for the company for technical talent and for excellence was not wavering.”
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 do feel that we need to reindustrialize the country significantly to be safe in a military sense. I would really like to reteach ourselves how to make things at scale, how to be more independent, people that are your allies now may not be in the future.”
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
“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.”
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
“There's a dawning realization, especially in the labs, 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.”
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