Weiyao Wang spent eight years at Meta — his first job out of college — helping build multimodal perception systems and contributing to open-world segmentation projectsincluding SAM3D. His final day at Meta was last weekand he has since joined 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 Googlegiving it access to Nvidia’s latest GB300 chips and making it one of the first startups to run on the hardware.
The agreementannounced this past Tuesday at Google Cloud Nextfollows an earlier partnership with Nvidiaand puts 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 picking off 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 in both directions. Business Insider reported last week that Meta has now poached seven of TML’s founding members. A review of recent hires shows Thinking Machines is raiding Meta right back. At leastit appears based on a review of LinkedIn profilesthat TML has been hiring more researchers from Meta than from any other single employer.
The most prominent is Soumith ChintalaTML’s CTOwho spent 11 years at Meta and co-founded PyTorchthe 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 Dolláranother 11-year Meta veteran who served as research director and co-authored the influential Segment Anything modelis now on TML’s technical staff. Andrea Madottoa research scientist in Meta’s FAIR division focused on multimodal language modelsjoined TML in December. James Suna software engineer with nearly nine years at Meta working on LLM pre- and post-trainingalso made the jump.
TML has drawn talent from beyond Metatoo. 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 WaymoWindsurfand 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 figuresno strings attached — are well known by now. For researchers weighing their other optionsthe calculus may be as simple as this: Thinking Machines Lab is right now valued at $12 billion. Though that figure would’ve 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 Anthropicthere’s still a lot of financial upside.
Reached Friday morninga spokesperson for TML declined to comment for this story.
