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Published · transcript-backed

Caitlin Kalinowski: belief

17 May 2026 Lenny's Podcast Why we’re at the beginning of the AI hardware boom | Caitlin Kalinowski (ex–OpenAI, Meta, Apple)

“OpenAI is an amazing company and I was able to help build a robotics program there and attract some of that top talent in robotics, I think in the world.”

— Caitlin Kalinowski

Source trail

Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Caitlin Kalinowski
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
belief
Recorded
17 May 2026
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

Transcript context

…Along those lines, I have to ask you, recently you became famous, on Twitter at least, for quitting OpenAI. You tweeted that you're leaving with your brief explanation and got seven million views, 50, I don't know, 8,000 likes. What happened? Why'd you leave OpenAI? What happened? Yeah. So what I said in my tweet was that I have a lot of friends in the executive side of OpenAI that I care a lot about, I think are 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 War deal is not how I thought it should have been done. And both of those things can be true. And so my hope, Lenny, was that there's a third path. You see a lot of people just going along with what their company's 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 is an amazing company and I was able to help build a robotics program there and attract some of that top talent in robotics, I think in the world. And so I have a lot of, I don't know, this is a group of people I care a lot about. And you can also disagree 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. This is a great opportunity to just whisper to me, what OpenAI is working on? What is this robotics device [inaudible 01:17:30], just like just between you and me?…

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