Meta’s loss is Thinking Machines gain

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. His move to Thinking Machines Lab (TML) comes as the AI startup expands on multiple fronts. TML 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 poached seven of TML’s founding members. A review of recent hires shows Thinking Machines is raiding Meta right back. 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. Techcrunch event Meet your next investor or portfolio startup at Disrupt Your next round. Your next hire. Your next breakout opportunity. Find it at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, where 10,000+ founders, investors, and tech leaders gather for three days of 250+ tactical sessions, powerful introductions, and market-defining innovation. Register now to save up to $410. Meet your next investor or portfolio startup at Disrupt Your next round. Your next hire. Your next breakout opportunity. Find it at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, where 10,000+ founders, investors, and tech leaders gather for three days of 250+ tactical sessions, powerful introductions, and market-defining innovation. Register now to save up to $410. San Francisco, CA | October 13-15, 2026 REGISTER NOW 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. When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence. Connie Loizos Editor in Chief & General Manager April 30 San Francisco, CA StrictlyVC kicks off the year in SF. Register now for unfiltered fireside chats and VC insights with leaders from Uber, Replit, Eclipse, and more. Plus, high-value connections that actually move the needle. Tickets are limited. 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