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 final day at Meta was last week. He’s now at Thinking Machines Lab (TML).
That’s not a shock. TML has been on a hiring spree, and it just signed a multibillion-dollar cloud deal with Google, giving it access to Nvidia’s latest GB300 chips. That makes TML one of the first startups to run on that hardware, putting it in the same infrastructure tier as Anthropic and Meta. The deal was announced Tuesday at Google Cloud Next, following an earlier partnership with Nvidia.
Meta reportedly held talks to acquire Thinking Machines around this time last year. Instead, they’ve been picking off TML’s founders one by one. Business Insider reported last week that Meta has now poached seven of TML’s founding members. But a review of LinkedIn profiles shows TML is raiding Meta right back — and it looks like TML has been hiring more researchers from Meta than from any other single employer.
The most prominent hire is Soumith Chintala, TML’s CTO, who spent 11 years at Meta and co-founded PyTorch. 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 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 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 — they’ve 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.
Reached Friday morning, a spokesperson for TML declined to comment. Typical.
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