Thinking Machines Lab (TML) has been quietly building one of AI’s more notable rosters, recruiting heavily from Meta even as Meta has been picking off TML’s own founding members. The two-way talent exchange, reported in April 2026, underscores how competitive the market for AI researchers has become.
The latest arrivals at TML include Weiyao Wang, who spent eight years at Meta contributing to multimodal perception systems and the SAM3D open-world segmentation project, and Kenneth Li, a Harvard PhD who spent 10 months at Meta before joining TML this month. Business Insider reported last week that Meta had poached seven of TML’s founding members, but a review of LinkedIn profiles suggests TML has been hiring more researchers from Meta than from any other single employer.
The most prominent Meta alumnus at TML is Soumith Chintala, the startup’s CTO, who spent 11 years at Meta and co-founded PyTorch, the open-source deep learning framework that 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 from Meta’s FAIR division, joined in December, and James Sun, a software engineer with nearly nine years at Meta working on LLM training, also made the move.
TML has drawn talent from other companies as well. Neal Wu, a three-time gold medalist at the International Olympiad in Informatics and a founding member of 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.
The recruitment activity coincides with a period of significant expansion for TML. The company signed a multibillion-dollar cloud deal with Google, announced at Google Cloud Next, giving it access to Nvidia’s latest GB300 chips and placing it in the same infrastructure tier as Anthropic and Meta. The agreement follows an earlier partnership with Nvidia. Meta reportedly held talks to acquire TML around a year ago.
For researchers weighing their options, TML’s current valuation of $12 billion — despite having released just one product — may represent meaningful financial upside compared with the larger valuations of OpenAI and Anthropic. Meta’s compensation packages, reported to reach seven figures with no strings attached, remain a competing draw. TML declined to comment for this story.
Source: TechCrunch