How to ship hardware in the AI era | Caitlin Kalinowski (Apple, Meta, OpenAI)

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. 有个认知正在浮现，尤其是在实验室里：加速已经垂直拉升，靠键盘能做到的事情快触顶了。 When that happens, the next frontier is the physical world. 到那时，下一个前沿就是物理世界。 Robotics, manufacturing, industrialization. 机器人、制造业、工业化。 You're living in the future and designing it. 你活在未来，并且在塑造它。 There's probably more change in war than there is in consumer electronics. 战场上的变化可能比消费电子还要剧烈。 In the next 2 years, we need to invest a lot more in drones than in aircraft carriers. 未来2年，我们要把更多资源投入无人机，而不是航空母舰。 Just imagine 100,000 drones coming out of China just at us. 想象一下10万架无人机从中国直扑而来。 I do feel that we need to re-industrialize the country significantly to be safe in a military sense. 我确实觉得，我们需要大幅重建工业能力，才能保障军事安全。 I would really like to retach ourselves how to make things at scale, how to be more independent. 我很希望我们重新学会大规模制造，学会更独立自主。 People that are your allies now may not be in the future. 现在是盟友的，未来不见得还是。 You worked with some of the most legendary successful builders. 你跟过一些史上最传奇的建造者共事。 Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Alman. 其中包括三位大名鼎鼎的人物：Steve Jobs、Mark Zuckerberg 以及 Sam Altman。 Sam is really good at saying why not more? Sam 特别擅长问：为什么不能更多？ Why not 100x or 10,000x? 为什么不能100倍或10000倍？ You're thinking too small. 你想得太小了。 For Steve, the bar he held for the company for technical talent and for excellence was not wavering. Steve 对公司、对技术人才、对卓越的要求，从未动摇。 What does it take to create a robot that feels human and connected? 怎样才能造出让人感觉有人情味、有连接感的机器人？ If you walk into a room and a robot's just like like it's creepy. 你走进房间，看到机器人呆站着，真的挺瘆人。 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. 你希望这些设备没有威胁感，外观柔和，能对你做出反应。Pixar 和 Disney 大概是全球最擅长这类设计的。 There's a meteor called memory prices that are coming for consumer hardware and robotics and physical AI. 有颗陨石叫「内存价格」，正砸向消费硬件、机器人和实体AI领域。 We're in trouble as an industry. 整个行业都有麻烦了。 Today, my guest is Caitlyn Kalinowski. 今天我们的嘉宾是 Caitlin Kalinowski。 Caitlyn is one of the most soughtafter and accomplished hardware leaders in Silicon Valley. Caitlin 是硅谷最受追捧、最出色的硬件领导者之一。 She was part of the original unibody MacBook Pro teams and technical lead on the MacBook Air and Mac Pro at Apple. 她是 Apple 一体式 MacBook Pro 早期成员，及 MacBook Air、Mac Pro 技术负责人。 She led the AR glasses hardware team at Meta, including the team behind Orion, their most advanced AR product. 她在 Meta 主导 AR 眼镜硬件团队，包括他们最先进 AR 产品 Orion 背后的团队。 Before that, she ran the VR hardware team at Meta, where she helped design all of their incredible VR devices like the Rift and the Quest. 再往前，她在 Meta 负责 VR 硬件团队，参与设计了 Rift 和 Quest 等 VR 设备。 Most recently, she was at OpenAI, helping build their robotics and hardware division from scratch. 最近她在 OpenAI，从零搭建机器人和硬件部门。 Robots and hardware and physical AI are so hot right now. 机器人、硬件、实体AI，现在超级火。 Every AI company, and so many startups are launching, building AI hardware products, and Caitlyn has been at the center of this emerging field for decades. 每家AI公司、无数创业公司都在推出AI硬件产品，而 Caitlin 在这个新兴领域深耕了几十年。 This conversation goes in a lot of different directions, many that I did not expect, and I hope to do a lot more episodes on the hardware side of building over the next few months. 这次对话走向了很多我没预料到的方向，我也希望未来几个月能做更多硬件创业方面的节目。 Before we get into it, don't forget to check out lenny's productass.com for an incredible set of deals available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers. 在正片开始之前，别忘了访问 lenny's productass.com，那里有专属 Lenny 新闻订阅用户的超值优惠。 With that, I bring you Caitlyn Kalinowski. 请欢迎我们的嘉宾 Caitlin Kalinowski。 Caitlyn, thank you so much for being here. Caitlin，非常感谢你来到节目。 Welcome to the podcast. 欢迎来到播客。 Thank you so much for having me. 非常感谢你邀请我。 I'm excited to be here. 很高兴来到这里。 We're going to go in a bunch of different directions. 今天我们会聊很多方向。 I'm going to bounce around. 我会跳着聊。 I want to talk about VR. 我想聊聊 VR。 So much money, so many resources. 砸了那么多钱，调动了那么多资源。 So many smart people have been working on VR for so long. 这么多聪明人在 VR 上干了这么久。 Meta spent, I don't know, 10 billion dollars. Meta 花了，我不知道，100 亿美元。 Like they renamed the company Meta to lean into VR as the future of this metaverse that we're going to be living through. 他们把公司改名为 Meta，就是要押注 VR，押注这个我们将要生活其中的元宇宙。 Feels like a lot of people are leaning out now. 感觉很多人现在开始往回退了。 Feels like Meta stepping back. 感觉 Meta 在往后退。 Apple's stepping back with the Vision Pro in spite of the incredible hardware that everyone that you built that your team built. Apple 也在收缩 Vision Pro，尽管你们团队造出了那么出色的硬件。 just like I' I've got a couple of the devices. 我自己也有几台设备。 It's just like a magical experience that you've unlike anything you've ever experienced still has not caught on. 那种神奇的体验前所未有，但就是没火起来。 What happened? 到底发生了什么？ Is there still a future where VR catches on or is the future kind of AR and something else? VR 还有普及的未来吗？还是说未来其实在 AR 或别的方向？ 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. 我没料到会走到今天这一步，但我的看法是：VR 帮我们弄明白了如何在空间中定位物体，无论是虚拟世界还是现实世界，以及如何把两者连接起来。 Um, we figured out SLAM, which was how to how to do positioning in space using cameras. 嗯，我们攻克了 SLAM，也就是用摄像头做空间定位。 We figured out a lot of depth uh applications of depth sensors. 我们在深度传感器的各种应用上也摸清楚了很多。 We figured out how humans um perceive visual data in space. 我们弄明白了人类如何感知空间中的视觉信息。 And all of that actually, while it's great for VR, and I think VR gaming is a really interesting um it is kind of a niche, but I think it's an interesting niche. 这一切对 VR 本身当然很有价值，我认为 VR 游戏是个很有意思的细分市场，算是小众，但我觉得这个小众挺有意思的。 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. 我现在看到的是，在机器人领域，这些技术全都用上了，因为你必须理解机器人在空间中是怎么运动的。 You need to understand how far it is from everything. 你得知道它跟周围所有东西的距离。 You need to understand if you're wearing a VR headset and driving the robot. 你得想清楚，如果你戴着 VR 头显来驱动机器人会怎样。 It's the same real technology. 底层技术是一样的。 And so for me, I view it as a step in a long technological um arc. 所以对我来说，我把它看作漫长技术演进弧线上的一个阶段。 And to be honest, as an as someone who's not using VR a lot right now, I'm really glad that we did it. 老实说，作为一个现在不怎么用 VR 的人，我真的很庆幸我们做了。 But I don't think it I expected it to be big obviously or or wouldn't have been working in Oculus. 不过我当时肯定觉得它会做大，不然我也不会去做 Oculus 了。 And I think maybe the social aspect of having something in front of your face 我觉得，把东西挡在脸上这件事本身的社交问题， um is part of why it didn't take off. 也是它没能流行起来的原因之一。 And I think that we learned of course with Google Glass how important that is as well. Google Glass 也让我们见识到这一点有多关键。 And so when we tried to make it social um it's hard to make it social when you have you know your face covered. 我们想让 VR 变得更社交，但脸都被遮住了，这本来就很难做到。 That is interesting. 这倒有意思。 So just like the investment and uh innovation that happened that uh that went into VR has actually proven to be really useful and so it feels like the companies that have put a lot of effort into that and money into that have are ahead on the next step. VR 时代的投入和创新最终真的派上了用场。那些在这上面砸过大钱、下过苦功的公司，在下一步已经领先了。 So is that where you think things go? 接下来会往哪个方向走？ What's kind of like where do you think things are going? 你觉得未来会是什么样？ Is it AR glasses something else? 是 AR 眼镜还是别的？ What's kind of the future of this? 未来会往哪走？ I believe in AR glasses as part of the future because I I do think looking down at your phone all the time is not great for us as social as social creatures. 我相信 AR 眼镜会是未来的一部分，因为我确实觉得一直低头看手机对我们这些社交动物来说并不好。 So, if you can maintain social connections and get information, that's where I think we're headed. 所以，如果能戴着它维持社交连接、随时获取信息，我觉得那就是我们要去的方向。 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 microlleds that are not quite ready for mass production. 我最近做的 Orion，就是那款 AR 眼镜，其实有点超前，用了波导和 micro-LED，量产条件还没成熟。 The yields just aren't there. 良品率还不够。 The cost is still high. 成本还是太高。 I think that's absolutely a path that AR glasses are likely to take. 我觉得 AR 眼镜绝对是会走这条路的。 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, um, with them? 等我们解决了交互问题，走路时、在公共场合，怎么安静无声地操控它， I think once we start to figure out some of those, um, 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. 我觉得一旦攻克这些难关，显示屏平时关着、需要时再开，这本身就是未来的一部分。 So, that's part of it. 这是其中一个方向。 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, um, uh, autonomy period manufacturing, like all of these technologies are going to need the same the same piece parts, the same pieces that we built in the AR VR spectrum. 另一个方向是，从 VR 到 AR、再到机器人领域，这条技术脉络一直在延续。往大了看，自动驾驶汽车、无人机、机器人、制造业的自动化，所有这些技术需要的核心零件，正是我们在 AR VR 领域打造出来的那些。 It's interesting with VR there's this idea with when you build product, there's always this question when something doesn't work. 说到 VR，做产品时有个永恒的问题：东西不好用，到底是执行出了问题， Is it just like you executed it badly or the idea was just a bad idea? 还是想法本身就走错了？ And it's always hard to know. 这很难说清楚。 Feels like with the AR it's just like so much effort was put into making it work just like for a decade many decades and just has not worked. AR 这边就有这种感觉，花了那么多力气，好几十年了，就是没跑起来。 So it's like nice that we know okay there's nothing we can really do right now to make this work. 所以现在至少清楚一件事：单靠现有条件是做不成的。 I completely agree with you. 我完全同意你说的。 The issue is just like I don't want to sit on my couch disconnected from the world and even if I could see people through it, it's just like I'm just gonna I don't need this. 问题在于，我不想窝在沙发上跟世界隔绝，哪怕能透过它看到别人，我也会觉得，算了，我不需要。 It's not that big of a deal. 又不是什么大不了的事。 and AR you're going to just start getting more and more larger and larger displays. AR 方向的显示屏会越来越大。 But the great thing about Orion is you got 70 degree field of view binocular. Orion 的亮点是 70 度双目视场角。 So with the prototype you got to sense what this is really going to be like in the future. 戴上原型机，你就能感受到未来真正的样子。 It's very hard to describe how it feels to use a pair of glasses like this. 很难描述戴上这副眼镜是什么感觉。 But when you do, you suddenly are like oh like I feel immersed. 但一旦戴上，你会突然发现，我有沉浸感了。 It's the field of view is wide enough. 视场角够宽。 I feel immersed and it's becomes pretty clear that I think I think this is part of where the future's headed. 有沉浸感，我越来越觉得这就是未来的方向之一。 This episode is brought to you by our season's presenting sponsor, Work OS. 本期节目由本季主赞助商 Work OS 呈现。 What do OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Versell, Replet, Sierra, Clay, and hundreds of other winning companies all have in common? 你知道这些一流的硅谷公司比如 OpenAI、Anthropic、Cursor、Vercel、Replit、Sierra、Clay 它们都有什么共同点吗？ They are all powered by work OS. 它们都在用 Work OS。