Weiyao Wang spent eight years at Meta—his first job after college—developing multimodal perception systems and contributing to open-world segmentation projects, such as SAM3D. He left Meta last week and has now joined Thinking Machines Lab (TML). His move comes as the AI startup expands aggressively on multiple fronts. TML recently signed a multibillion-dollar cloud deal with Google, securing access to Nvidia’s latest GB300 chips and becoming one of the first startups to operate on that hardware. The agreement, announced this past Tuesday at Google Cloud Next, builds on an earlier partnership with Nvidia and places TML in the same infrastructure tier as Anthropic and Meta. (Meta reportedly held talks to acquire Thinking Machines around this time last year and has more recently been poaching TML’s founders one by one.)

The talent landscape remains fluid. Wang and Kenneth Li—a Harvard PhD who spent ten months at Meta before joining TML this month—are the latest examples of a two-way talent grab. Business Insider reported last week that Meta has poached seven of TML’s founding members. However, a review of recent hires shows Thinking Machines is raiding Meta in return. Based on LinkedIn profiles, TML has hired more researchers from Meta than from any other single employer. The most prominent is Soumith Chintala, TML’s CTO, 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 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 influential Segment Anything model, is now on TML’s technical staff. Andrea Madotto, a research scientist in Meta’s FAIR division focused on multimodal language models, joined TML in December. James Sun, a software engineer with nearly nine years at Meta working on LLM pre- and post-training, also made the switch.

TML has drawn talent from beyond Meta as well. Neal Wu—a three-time gold medalist at the International Olympiad in Informatics and a founding member of the buzzy 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.

Meta’s pay packages—seven figures, no strings attached—are well known by now. For researchers weighing their options, the calculus may be straightforward: Thinking Machines Lab is currently valued at $12 billion. While that figure would have been unimaginable for a company at this stage in any previous tech cycle (it has released just one product so far), compared with the record-breaking valuations of OpenAI and Anthropic, there is still considerable financial upside. Reached Friday morning, a spokesperson for TML declined to comment for this story.