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Weiyao Wang spent eight years at Meta \u2014 his first job out of college \u2014 helping build multimodal perception systems and contributing to open-world segmentation projects, including SAM3D. His final day at Meta was last week, and he has since joined Thinking Machines Lab (TML).<\/p>\n
His move to TML comes as the AI startup expands on multiple fronts. It just signed a multibillion-dollar cloud deal<\/a> with Google, giving it access to Nvidia\u2019s latest GB300 chips and making it one of the first startups to run on the hardware.<\/p>\n The agreement, announced this past Tuesday at Google Cloud Next, follows an earlier partnership with Nvidia, and puts TML in the same infrastructure tier as Anthropic and Meta. (Meta reportedly held talks to acquire Thinking Machines around this time last year<\/a> and has more recently been picking off TML\u2019s founders one by one.)<\/p>\n The talent picture remains fluid. Wang and Kenneth Li \u2014 a Harvard PhD who spent 10 months at Meta before joining TML this month \u2014 are the latest examples of a talent grab that runs in both directions. Business Insider reported last week that Meta has now poached seven<\/a> of TML\u2019s founding members. A review of recent hires shows Thinking Machines is raiding Meta right back. At least, it appears based on a review of LinkedIn profiles, that TML has been hiring more researchers from Meta than from any other single employer.<\/p>\n The most prominent is Soumith Chintala, TML\u2019s CTO, who spent 11 years at Meta and co-founded PyTorch, the open source deep learning framework that now underpins most of the world\u2019s AI research. He left Meta in late 2025 and was appointed CTO earlier this year. Piotr Doll\u00e1r, another 11-year Meta veteran who served as research director and co-authored the influential Segment Anything model, is now on TML\u2019s technical staff. Andrea Madotto, a research scientist in Meta\u2019s 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 jump.<\/p>\n TML has drawn talent from beyond Meta, too. Neal Wu \u2014 a three-time gold medalist at the International Olympiad in Informatics and a founding member of the buzzy<\/a> coding startup Cognition \u2014 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\u2019s AI Superintelligence team pre-training OpenAI models for code before joining in March.<\/p>\n The startup\u2019s headcount now stands at around 140.<\/p>\n Techcrunch event<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco, CA<\/span> Meta\u2019s pay packages \u2014 seven figures, no strings attached \u2014 are well known by now. For researchers weighing their other options, the calculus may be as simple as this: Thinking Machines Lab is right now valued at $12 billion<\/a>. Though that figure would\u2019ve been unimaginable for a company at this stage in any previous tech cycle (it has released just one product<\/a> so far), compared with the record-breaking valuations of OpenAI and Anthropic, there\u2019s still a lot of financial upside.<\/p>\n Reached Friday morning, a spokesperson for TML declined to comment for this story.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission<\/a>. This doesn\u2019t affect our editorial independence.<\/em><\/p>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 13-15, 2026<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n