The talent exchange between Meta and Thinking Machines Lab runs in both directions. Business Insider reported that Meta has poached seven of TML’s founding members. But a review of LinkedIn profiles by TechCrunch found that Thinking Machines Lab has been hiring from Meta more than from any other single employer. The most recent example: Weiyao Wang, who spent eight years at Meta working on multimodal perception systems and contributing to open-world segmentation projects including SAM3D, joined TML last week.
Who has moved
The most prominent departure from Meta to TML is Soumith Chintala, now TML’s CTO, who spent 11 years at Meta and co-founded PyTorch, which TechCrunch describes as “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 Dollar, an 11-year Meta veteran who served as research director and co-authored the 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 move.
The most recent arrival alongside Wang is Kenneth Li, a Harvard PhD who spent 10 months at Meta before joining TML this month.
TML has also drawn researchers from elsewhere. TechCrunch lists Neal Wu — a three-time gold medalist at the International Olympiad in Informatics and a founding member of coding startup Cognition; Jeffrey Tao via Waymo, Windsurf, and OpenAI; Muhammad Maaz from a research fellowship at Anthropic; Erik Wijmans from Apple; and Liliang Ren, who spent two and a half years on Microsoft’s AI Superintelligence team pre-training OpenAI models for code before joining in March.
Infrastructure and valuation context
TML signed a multibillion-dollar cloud deal with Google, announced at Google Cloud Next, giving it access to Nvidia’s latest GB300 chips, according to the report. TechCrunch describes this as placing TML “in the same infrastructure tier as Anthropic and Meta.” That follows an earlier partnership with Nvidia. The startup’s headcount now stands at around 140, the report says.
TML’s current valuation is $12 billion, according to TechCrunch. The report notes Meta reportedly held acquisition talks with Thinking Machines around this time last year and has more recently been recruiting TML’s founders. TML’s spokesperson declined to comment for the story.