Weiyao Wang, who spent eight years at Meta contributing to multimodal perception systems and open-world segmentation projects including SAM3D, departed Meta last week to join Thinking Machines Lab (TML).
His move aligns with TML's aggressive expansion on multiple fronts. The AI startup recently secured a multi-billion dollar cloud deal with Google, granting it access to Nvidia’s latest GB300 chips and making it one of the first startups to deploy this advanced hardware.
This agreement, announced at Google Cloud Next, builds upon an earlier partnership with Nvidia, elevating TML to the same infrastructure tier as major players like Anthropic and Meta. Interestingly, Meta reportedly held talks to acquire Thinking Machines around this time last year and has more recently been recruiting TML's founding members.
Despite Meta's overtures, the talent flow demonstrates a dynamic, two-way exchange. Wang and Kenneth Li, a Harvard PhD who joined TML this month after 10 months at Meta, exemplify TML's success in attracting talent. While Business Insider reported Meta has poached seven TML founding members, a review of recent hires indicates Thinking Machines is actively recruiting from Meta in return. LinkedIn profiles suggest TML has hired more researchers from Meta than from any other single employer.
Prominent among TML's new Meta recruits is Soumith Chintala, now TML’s CTO, who spent 11 years at Meta and co-founded PyTorch, the open-source deep learning framework underpinning most global AI research. Chintala left Meta in late 2025 and assumed his CTO role 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 from Meta’s FAIR division focusing 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 transition.
TML's talent acquisition extends beyond Meta. Neal Wu, a three-time International Olympiad in Informatics gold medalist and a founding member of the coding startup Cognition, joined early this year. Jeffrey Tao arrived from Waymo, Windsurf, and OpenAI. Muhammad Maaz previously held a research fellowship at Anthropic. Erik Wijmans came from Apple, and Liliang Ren, who spent two and a half years on Microsoft’s AI Superintelligence team pre-training OpenAI models for code, joined in March.
The startup's current headcount stands at approximately 140.
Meta’s well-known seven-figure, no-strings-attached compensation packages remain attractive. However, for researchers weighing their options, the calculus may now include Thinking Machines Lab’s substantial $12 billion valuation – a figure once unimaginable for a startup – which presents a compelling draw for top-tier AI professionals.