Meta's loss is Thinking Machines' gain (3 minute read)
AI startup Thinking Machines Lab is successfully recruiting top researchers from Meta, including PyTorch co-founder Soumith Chintala, by offering equity upside from its $12 billion valuation despite Meta's seven-figure cash packages.
Deep dive
- Thinking Machines Lab has hired more researchers from Meta than from any other single company, including PyTorch co-founder Soumith Chintala as CTO and Segment Anything co-author Piotr Dollár
- The talent flow runs in both directions: Meta has poached seven of TML's founding members, while TML continues to recruit from Meta's research divisions
- TML just signed a multibillion-dollar cloud deal with Google announced at Cloud Next, providing access to Nvidia's latest GB300 chips and placing it in the same infrastructure tier as Anthropic and Meta
- The startup is valued at $12 billion with around 140 employees, having released just one product so far, but offers significant equity upside compared to OpenAI and Anthropic's record-breaking valuations
- Recent Meta-to-TML hires include Weiyao Wang (8 years building multimodal perception and SAM3D), James Sun (9 years on LLM training), and Andrea Madotto (FAIR multimodal language models researcher)
- TML has also recruited top talent from Cognition (Neal Wu, three-time gold medalist at International Olympiad in Informatics), OpenAI, Waymo, Anthropic, Apple, and Microsoft's AI Superintelligence team
- Meta reportedly held acquisition talks with Thinking Machines around April 2025 before the talent competition intensified
- The financial calculus for researchers: Meta offers seven-figure packages with no strings attached, while TML offers equity in a $12B company still early enough for major upside potential
Decoder
- PyTorch: Open source deep learning framework co-founded by Soumith Chintala at Meta, now the foundation for most AI research worldwide
- Segment Anything (SAM): Influential computer vision model from Meta that can segment any object in images; SAM3D is the 3D version
- FAIR: Facebook AI Research, Meta's research division focused on advancing AI
- Multimodal: AI systems that can process and understand multiple types of data like text, images, and audio together
- GB300: Nvidia's latest generation of GPU chips designed for AI workloads
- Pre-training and post-training: The two main phases of developing large language models—pre-training on massive datasets, then post-training for specific tasks and safety
Original article
Weiyao Wang spent eight years at Meta — his first job out of college — helping build multimodal perception systems and contributing to open-world segmentation projects, including SAM3D. His final day at Meta was last week, and he has since joined Thinking Machines Lab (TML).
His move to TML comes as the AI startup expands on multiple fronts. It just signed a multibillion-dollar cloud deal with Google, giving it access to Nvidia's latest GB300 chips and making it one of the first startups to run on the hardware.
The agreement, announced this past Tuesday at Google Cloud Next, follows an earlier partnership with Nvidia, and puts TML in the same infrastructure tier as Anthropic and Meta. (Meta reportedly held talks to acquire Thinking Machines around this time last year and has more recently been picking off TML's founders one by one.)
The talent picture remains fluid. Wang and Kenneth Li — a Harvard PhD who spent 10 months at Meta before joining TML this month — are the latest examples of a talent grab that runs in both directions. Business Insider reported last week that Meta has now poached seven of TML's founding members. A review of recent hires shows Thinking Machines is raiding Meta right back. At least, it appears based on a review of LinkedIn profiles, that TML has been hiring more researchers from Meta than from any other single employer.
The most prominent is Soumith Chintala, TML's CTO, who spent 11 years at Meta and co-founded PyTorch, the open source deep learning framework that now underpins most of the world's AI research. He left Meta in late 2025 and was appointed CTO earlier this year. Piotr Dollár, another 11-year Meta veteran who served as research director and co-authored the influential Segment Anything model, is now on TML's technical staff. Andrea Madotto, a research scientist in Meta's FAIR division focused on multimodal language models, joined TML in December. James Sun, a software engineer with nearly nine years at Meta working on LLM pre- and post-training, also made the jump.
TML has drawn talent from beyond Meta, too. Neal Wu — a three-time gold medalist at the International Olympiad in Informatics and a founding member of the buzzy coding startup Cognition — joined early this year. Jeffrey Tao came via Waymo, Windsurf, and OpenAI. Muhammad Maaz previously held a research fellowship at Anthropic. Erik Wijmans arrived from Apple. Liliang Ren spent two and a half years on Microsoft's AI Superintelligence team pre-training OpenAI models for code before joining in March.
The startup's headcount now stands at around 140.
Meta's pay packages — seven figures, no strings attached — are well known by now. For researchers weighing their other options, the calculus may be as simple as this: Thinking Machines Lab is right now valued at $12 billion. Though that figure would've been unimaginable for a company at this stage in any previous tech cycle (it has released just one product so far), compared with the record-breaking valuations of OpenAI and Anthropic, there's still a lot of financial upside.
Reached Friday morning, a spokesperson for TML declined to comment for this story.