Thinking Machines Lab hires talent from Meta as AI talent war escalates

Thinking Machines Lab has been hiring researchers from Meta at a notable pace, even as Meta has poached seven of the startup's founding members. The two-way talent movement underscores the intensity of competition for AI researchers. Weiyao Wang, who spent eight years at Meta building multimodal perception systems and contributing to open-world segmentation projects including SAM3D, left last week to join Thinking Machines Lab. He is joined by Kenneth Li, a Harvard PhD who spent 10 months at Meta before making the same move this month. The most prominent Meta hire is Soumith Chintala, Thinking Machines Lab's CTO, who spent 11 years at Meta and co-founded PyTorch. Piotr Dollár, an 11-year Meta veteran who co-authored the Segment Anything model, is now on the technical staff. Andrea Madotto, a research scientist in Meta's FAIR division, joined in December. James Sun, a software engineer with nearly nine years at Meta working on LLM pre- and post-training, also made the jump. The startup's headcount now stands at around 140. It recently signed a multibillion-dollar cloud deal with Google for access to Nvidia's latest GB300 chips, putting it in the same infrastructure tier as Anthropic and Meta. Thinking Machines Lab is currently valued at $12 billion.