Weiyao Wang spent eight years at Meta—his first job out of college—helping build multimodal perception systems and contributing to open-world segmentation projects, including SAM3D. His last day at Meta was last week and he has since joined the Thinking Machines Lab (TML).
His move to TML comes as the AI startup expands on multiple fronts. It just signed a multibillion-dollar cloud deal with Google, giving it access to Nvidia’s latest GB300 chips and making it one of the first startups to work with the hardware.
The deal, announced last Tuesday at Google Cloud Next, follows a previous partnership with Nvidia and puts TML on the same infrastructure level as Anthropic and Meta. (Meta was reportedly in talks to acquire Thinking Machines around this time last year and most recently singles out TML’s founders 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 now has poaching seven of the founding members of TML. A review of recent hires shows that Thinking Machines is raiding the Meta right. At least, it appears based on a review of LinkedIn profiles, that TML has hired more researchers from Meta than any other single employer.
Most notable is Soumith Chintala, CTO of TML, who 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 at the end of 2025 and was appointed CTO earlier this year. Piotr Dollár, another 11-year Meta veteran who served as research director and co-author of the seminal Segment Anything model, is now on TML’s technical staff. Andrea Madotto, a researcher in Meta’s FAIR division focused on multimodal language models, joined TML in December. James Sun, a software engineer with almost nine years at Meta working on the LLM before and after training, also made the jump.
TML has drawn talent beyond Meta, too. Neal Wu — three-time gold medalist at the International Informatics Olympiad and founding member of hum coding startup Cognition — joined earlier 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.
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Meta’s pay packages — seven figures, no strings attached — are now known. For researchers weighing their other options, the math can be as simple as this: Thinking Machines Lab is currently valued at $12 billion. While this rate would have been unthinkable for a company at this stage in any previous technology cycle (it just launched a product so far), compared to the record-breaking valuations of OpenAI and Anthropic, there are still plenty of financial benefits.
When reached Friday morning, a TML representative declined to comment for this story.
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