Meta’s loss is Thinking Machines’ gain

Weiyao Wang spent eight years at Meta – his first job out of college – where he helped build multimodal perception systems and contributed to open-world segmentation projects including SAM3D. Last week was his last day at Meta and he has been working at Thinking Machines Lab (TML) ever since.

His move to TML comes as the AI ​​startup expands on multiple fronts. It just signed a multi-billion dollar cloud deal with Google, giving it access to Nvidia’s latest GB300 chips and making it one of the first startups to run on the hardware.

The agreement, announced last Tuesday at Google Cloud Next, follows a previous partnership with Nvidia and places TML in the same infrastructure tier as Anthropic and Meta. (Meta is said to have been in discussions to acquire Thinking Machines around this time last year and recently picked the founders of TML one by one.)

The talent picture remains fluid. Wang and Kenneth Li – a Harvard PhD who spent 10 months at Meta before joining TML this month – are the latest examples of a talent grab that runs both ways. Business Insider reported last week that Meta has now been poached seven of the founding members of TML. An overview of recent recruitments shows that Thinking Machines is attacking Meta straight back. In any case, based on a review of LinkedIn profiles, it appears that TML has hired more researchers from Meta than from any other employer.

The most prominent is Soumith Chintala, the CTO of TML, who spent eleven 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 at the end of 2025 and was appointed CTO earlier this year. Piotr Dollár, also an 11-year Meta veteran who was research director and co-author of the influential Segment Anything model, is now part of TML’s technical staff. Andrea Madotto, a research scientist at Meta’s FAIR division who focuses on multimodal language models, joined TML in December. James Sun, a software engineer who spent almost nine years at Meta on LLM pre- and post-training, also made the jump.

TML has also attracted talent from outside Meta. Neal Wu – three-time gold medalist at the International Olympiad in Computer Science and one of the founders of the buzzing 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 came over from Apple. Liliang Ren spent two and a half years on Microsoft’s AI Superintelligence team training OpenAI models for code before joining in March.

The startup’s workforce now stands at about 140.

Meta’s pay packages – seven figures, without obligation – are now common knowledge. For researchers weighing their other options, the calculation could be as simple as this: Thinking Machines Lab is currently valued at $12 billion. Although that figure would have been unthinkable for a company at this stage of an earlier technology cycle (it was just released). one product to date), compared to the record-breaking valuations of OpenAI and Anthropic, there is still a lot of financial upside.

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