Meta’s loss is Thinking Machines’ gain — the talent war is real

Weiyao Wang spent eight years at Meta — his first job out of college — building multimodal perception systems and contributing to open-world segmentation projects like SAM3D. His last day was last week. He’s now at Thinking Machines Lab (TML).

That move alone wouldn’t be remarkable if it weren’t for the broader context. TML just signed a multibillion-dollar cloud deal with Google, announced at Google Cloud Next this past Tuesday. The deal gives TML access to Nvidia’s latest GB300 chips, making it one of the first startups to run on that hardware. That puts TML in the same infrastructure tier as Anthropic and Meta, which is a big deal for a company that’s barely a year old.

The timing is interesting. Meta reportedly held talks to acquire Thinking Machines around this time last year, and has since been picking off TML’s founders one by one. But the talent flow runs both ways. Business Insider reported last week that Meta has poached seven of TML’s founding members. A quick scan of LinkedIn shows TML has been hiring more researchers from Meta than from any other single employer.

The most prominent catch 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 hasn’t only raided Meta. 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 options, the calculus may be simple: Thinking Machines Lab is currently valued at $12 billion. 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). But compared with the record-breaking valuations of OpenAI and Anthropic, there’s still a lot of financial upside.

A spokesperson for TML declined to comment when I reached out Friday morning. But the numbers speak for themselves.