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The AI frontier is moving from digital to physical.
Most people aren't ready for what that means... for startups, for supply chains, or for the world.
I unpack all of it with @lennysan. 👇
Caitlin Kalinowski (@kalinowski007) helped engineer the original unibody MacBook Pro and was technical lead on the MacBook Air and Mac Pro at @Apple, was @Meta's first consumer electronics hire and went on to lead their AR glasses and VR hardware teams, and most recently was at @OpenAI helping build their robotics and hardware teams from scratch.
In our in-depth conversation, we discuss:
🔸 Why the AI frontier is shifting from digital to physical
🔸 How the technologies built for VR became the foundation of modern warfare
🔸 Why humanoid robots are still just prototypes, and what’s most gating mass deployment
🔸 The coming memory price shock and why she’s telling startups to pre-buy now
🔸 Lessons from Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sam Altman
🔸 Why she walked away from OpenAI after the DoD deal
Listen now
piped.video/watch?v=G5WTgB87…
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Dario is right.
We Must Pace the Frontier: I’ve written a new essay on why the AI industry should slow down, with a three-part plan for doing so.
Anthropic is unilaterally committing to the first of these steps. We’ll provide third-party evaluators with permanent, employee-level access to our systems, so that they can verify adherence to our safety measures, report on incidents, and assess models’ alignment during training.
You can read the full post here: darioamodei.com/post/we-must…
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Worth reading.
I wrote about the state of AI, why I’m concerned about the next few years, and the choices we need to make to keep the future in humanity’s hands.
An Alien Mind: openai.com/index/an-alien-mi…
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Caitlin Kalinowski retweeted
A robot that swims underwater, then flies straight out of it! 🦢
Water is 1,000 times denser than air. Moving through one or the other normally means two completely different machines.
Around 100 bird species disagree. Loons, gulls, puffins and petrels dive after prey, then leap back into the sky.
Engineers at MIT and EPFL built a robot that does the same thing.
It's a flapping-wing aerial-aquatic vehicle, it weighs under 300 grams, and the results are out in Science. @RaphZufferey who runs the AURA Lab at MIT, is lead author.
A waterproof motor drives a crankshaft that pumps two flexible wings up and down at set frequencies, and a motorised tail changes angle to climb or dive.
The wing membranes are coated with hydrophobic nanoparticles so water sheds off them.
Wing flexibility turned out to be the whole game. Flexible enough to keep flapping amplitude low in water, firm enough to hold the robot up in air.
→ Swims at almost 1 m/s flapping at around 5 Hz
→ Flies at around 6 m/s at a similar frequency, close to real diving birds
→ The water-to-air transition needs a pitch of around 70°. Shallower and the wingtips catch the surface, steeper and it falls back in
My favourite finding is the one about feet. Puffins and ducks paddle at the surface to get airborne, so the team assumed a robot would need something equivalent.
It doesn't. Wings and tail alone are enough.
Funded in part by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship 🇵🇱
Read more here: news.mit.edu/2026/new-flappi…
~~
♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news → ziegler.substack.com
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I want a little minibot (usb?) that does something cute when my AI agents need my attention… maybe it raises its hand or flashes an LED? Please share anything you’ve found like this, thanks!
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Caitlin Kalinowski retweeted
Read through the fcc advanced robot ban again and I dont think a significant amount of robotics startups here in the U.S think it applies to them but it probably does (if its over 4.4lbs, moves around, can be tele oped, and has a camera - it’s an advanced robot)
>65% percent of your bom cost has to be from US suppliers, otherwise it is classified as a foreign robot - doesnt matter that you assembled it in the US
If youre under that 65% you can apply for an exemption but you need to state why you couldn’t get supply in the US and whats your plans to reshore those components + more (see image)
your sales qty most likely wont let you get classified as COTS
Nvidia gpu’s are probably counting towards foreign bom, your actuators are most definitely considered foreign & tariffs count towards foreign bom as well
Those low end cheap 12 feetechs on a mobile base bots i keep seeing pop up will count as foreign robots basically and be banned for sale
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Work with Sam!
hiring for hardware right now
we have more customer demand than we can practically service (which means new use cases) and need to scale the next generation of power systems for a bunch of future products.
DM me the most ambitious thing you’ve built + why you want to collab.
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Caitlin Kalinowski retweeted
US visas issued to international students fell by roughly a third in 2025. Today, DHS finalized changes to a rule known as "Duration of Status" — a move that will help lock that decline in place. The fallout for the STEM workforce, innovation, and economic growth could be severe.
A sustained one-third decline in foreign STEM graduates entering the US labor force would shrink the high-skill STEM workforce by 6.2% overall and by 11.5% at the PhD level. Over a decade, that would cut annual US GDP by $240 billion to $481 billion, comparable to losing an entire state's economy.
That's the estimate from @AmyMNice, in a guest research brief for Hoover's Immigration Initiative, drawing on research she co-authored with @m_clem and @JeremyLNeufeld.
Read the full brief: hoover.org/research/breaking…
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Caitlin Kalinowski retweeted
「実験的三軸脱進機時計」とうとう完成。
myminifactory.com/frontier/a…
ダミーも含めおびただしい量のギアがあり壮観。時桁と分桁のパネルで現在時刻を5分単位で示せる。
脱進機（機械式時計の中枢部分）がトゥールビヨン（tourbillon）となっており、動作中はこれが回転する（しかも3軸で）。
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Caitlin Kalinowski retweeted
listen, i love the sports basement in the presidio, but it would have been much much cooler to get a billion dollar art museum funded by george lucas
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😍
Together with UC Berkeley we are announcing the laser phase plate - a breakthrough in atomic resolution imaging. This is the brightest continuous wave laser in the world, 100 million times the intensity of the surface of the sun.
Phase contrast plays an important role in microscopy, but it was thought close to impossible for electron microscopy, where it would require interfering with an electron beam. Holger Mueller and Robert Glaeser proposed exactly this using a standing wave laser. It has taken over 15 years to make this a reality. Biohub partnered with UC Berkeley and Mueller to support this work and to engineer and build the technology.
Contrast has been the critical barrier to achieving atomic resolution imaging of the cell. In cryo-electron tomography, a cellular imaging technology that uses electron microscopy, the low contrast makes it impossible to resolve anything but the largest proteins within their cellular context. The laser phase plate removes that barrier.
With advances in AI this breakthrough in contrast will start to open up a new frontier in structural biology, that will allow us to see the molecular machines of the cell, and how they assemble into far more complex and dynamic systems, and understand how they work.
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In technical civilization, we expend time to gain space. To enhance our power in the world of space is our main objective. Yet to have more does not mean to be more. The power we attain in the world of space terminates abruptly at the borderline of time. But time is the heart of existence. - Abraham Joshua Heschel
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VR did not fail. It graduated. Every roboticist I know is building on top of tech that VR paid to invent. The arc only looks linear in retrospect.
Just did @lennysan's podcast on why we're at the beginning of the AI hardware boom. 1/
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