Meta’s loss is thinking machines’ gain

Weiao Wang spent eight years at Meta — his first job out of college — where he helped build multimedia perception systems and contributed to open-world segmentation projects, including SAM3D. His last day at Meta was last week, and he has since joined Thinking Machines Lab (TML).

His move to TML comes as the AI ​​startup expands on multiple fronts. It has just signed a multi-billion-dollar cloud deal with Google, giving it access to Nvidia’s latest 300 GB chips and making it one of the first startups to work on the hardware.

The agreement, announced last Tuesday at Google Cloud Next, follows a previous partnership with Nvidia, and puts TML in the same infrastructure tier as Anthropic and Meta. (Meta was reportedly in talks to acquire Thinking Machines around this time last year, and recently picked up TML’s founders one by one.)

The talent image remains fluid. Wang and Kenneth Li — a Harvard Ph.D., who spent 10 months at Meta before joining TML this month — are the latest examples of a talent grab that goes both ways. Business Insider reported last week that Meta has now poached seven of TML’s founding members. A review of recent hires shows that Thinking Machines is directly raiding Meta. At the very least, it appears based on a review of LinkedIn profiles, that TML has hired more Meta Researchers than any other employer.

Most notable among them is Sumith Chintala, CTO at TML, who spent 11 years at Meta and co-founded PyTorch, the open source deep learning framework that now powers most of the world’s AI research. Meta left in late 2025 and was named CTO earlier this year. Piotr Dolarar, another 11-year Meta veteran who served as Research Director and co-authored the influential Segment Anything model, is now on the TML technical staff. Andrea Madotto, a research scientist in Meta’s FAIR division who focuses on multimodal language models, joined TML in December. Also making the jump was James Sun, a software engineer who spent nearly nine years at Meta and worked on his MBA pre- and post-training.

TML has attracted talent from outside the Meta as well. Neil Wu – a three-time gold medalist at the International Olympiad in Informatics and a founding member of programming startup Cognition – joined early this year. Jeffrey Tao came across Waymo, Windsurf, and OpenAI. Mohamed Moaz previously held a research fellowship in Anthropology. Eric Wegmans from Apple arrived. Liliang Ren spent two and a half years on Microsoft’s super AI team pre-training OpenAI models on code before joining in March.

The startup now employs about 140 people.

Meta’s pay packages – seven figures, with no strings attached – are now well known. For researchers considering their other options, the math might be as simple as this: Thinking Machines Lab is currently worth $12 billion. Although this number would have been unthinkable for a company at this point in any previous technology cycle (it has only released one product so far), compared to the record valuations of OpenAI and Anthropic, there is still plenty of financial upside.

A TML spokesperson, reached Friday morning, declined to comment on this story.