Meta’s loss is Thinking Machines’ gain, and the talent war is getting personal

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

Wang is not alone. Kenneth Li, a Harvard PhD who spent ten months at Meta before joining TML this month, made the same move. These are the latest data points in a talent tug-of-war that has been running in both directions for months.

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. And yes, Meta reportedly held talks to acquire Thinking Machines around this time last year. Since then, it has 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 recent LinkedIn hires 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 defector is Soumith Chintala, TML’s CTO. He 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 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 other options, the calculus may be simple: Thinking Machines Lab is valued at $12 billion. That figure would have 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. I suspect they’re too busy hiring.