Meta's Loss, Thinking Machines Lab's Gain

Weiyao Wang left Meta last week after 8 years there to join Thinking Machines Lab (TML). Wang had worked on multimodal perception systems and open-world segmentation projects such as SAM3D, and Harvard PhD Kenneth Li, who also passed through Meta, has recently joined TML as well.

TML recently signed a multi-billion-dollar cloud deal with Google, securing Nvidia GB300 chips. Announced at Google Cloud Next, the deal makes TML one of the first startups to use that hardware, and combined with its earlier Nvidia partnership, it now sits at the same infrastructure tier as Anthropic and Meta.

The talent flow runs both ways. According to Business Insider, Meta poached 7 founding TML members, but a review of LinkedIn profiles suggests TML has hired more ex-Meta researchers than any other single employer. Key hires include Soumith Chintala (CTO, PyTorch co-founder), Piotr Dollár (co-author of Segment Anything), Andrea Madotto, and James Sun.

Beyond Meta, TML has also brought on Neal Wu (a founding member of Cognition), Jeffrey Tao (Waymo, Windsurf, OpenAI), Muhammad Maaz (Anthropic), Erik Wijmans (Apple), and Liliang Ren (Microsoft AI Superintelligence). TML's headcount now stands at around 140, with a valuation of $12 billion. It has only one public product, Tinker, but for such an early stage, there's still substantial upside remaining.