Thinking Machines Lab (TML) has been steadily recruiting researchers from Meta, with at least two more joining the AI startup in April 2026. Weiyao Wang, who spent eight years at Meta building multimodal perception systems and contributing to the SAM3D segmentation project, left Meta last week and has joined TML. Kenneth Li, a Harvard PhD who spent 10 months at Meta, also joined TML this month.
The moves are part of a broader, two-way talent exchange between the two companies. Business Insider reported last week that Meta has poached seven of TML’s founding members. A review of LinkedIn profiles suggests TML has been hiring more researchers from Meta than from any other single employer.
The most prominent Meta-to-TML hire is Soumith Chintala, TML’s CTO, who spent 11 years at Meta and co-founded PyTorch, the open-source deep learning framework widely used in AI research. He left Meta in late 2025 and was appointed CTO earlier in 2026. Piotr Dollár, another 11-year Meta veteran and co-author of the Segment Anything model, is now on TML’s technical staff. Andrea Madotto, a research scientist from Meta’s FAIR division, joined TML in December. James Sun, a software engineer with nearly nine years at Meta, also made the move.
TML has also drawn talent from other organizations. Neal Wu, a three-time gold medalist at the International Olympiad in Informatics and a founding member of 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, who spent two and a half years on Microsoft’s AI Superintelligence team pre-training OpenAI models for code, joined in March 2026.
The talent activity coincides with TML’s expanding infrastructure. The startup announced a multibillion-dollar cloud deal with Google at Google Cloud Next this past Tuesday, giving it access to Nvidia’s latest GB300 chips and placing it in the same infrastructure tier as Anthropic and Meta. The agreement follows an earlier partnership with Nvidia. Meta reportedly held talks to acquire TML around a year ago.
TML’s headcount now stands at around 140. The startup is currently valued at $12 billion and has released one product so far. For researchers weighing their options, that valuation — and the financial upside it may represent compared to more established players — could factor into the decision to join, even against Meta’s reported seven-figure compensation packages. A TML spokesperson declined to comment.
Source: TechCrunch