{"id":3489508,"date":"2026-04-24T20:52:07","date_gmt":"2026-04-24T20:52:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/techingeek.com\/index.php\/2026\/04\/24\/metas-setback-is-thinking-machines-opportunity\/"},"modified":"2026-04-24T20:52:07","modified_gmt":"2026-04-24T20:52:07","slug":"metas-setback-is-thinking-machines-opportunity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/techingeek.com\/index.php\/2026\/04\/24\/metas-setback-is-thinking-machines-opportunity\/","title":{"rendered":"Meta\u2019s setback is Thinking Machines\u2019 opportunity"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n
\n

Weiyao Wang dedicated eight years to Meta \u2014 his inaugural position after college \u2014 assisting in the development of multimodal perception frameworks and taking part in open-world segmentation initiatives, including SAM3D. His last day at Meta occurred last week, and he has now transitioned to Thinking Machines Lab (TML).<\/p>\n

Wang’s transition to TML coincides with the AI startup’s expansion across various sectors. It recently secured a multibillion-dollar cloud agreement with Google, granting it access to Nvidia\u2019s newest GB300 chips and positioning it as one of the initial startups to utilize this hardware.<\/p>\n

The contract, revealed this past Tuesday at Google Cloud Next, follows a prior collaboration with Nvidia, placing TML alongside Anthropic and Meta in the equivalent infrastructure category. (Meta reportedly considered acquiring Thinking Machines around the same time last year and has recently been recruiting TML\u2019s founders individually.)<\/p>\n

The landscape of talent is shifting. Wang and Kenneth Li \u2014 a Harvard PhD who spent 10 months at Meta before joining TML this month \u2014 exemplify a two-way talent exchange. Business Insider indicated last week that Meta has now recruited seven of TML\u2019s founding members. An examination of recent hires suggests Thinking Machines is also actively recruiting from Meta. Based on a review of LinkedIn profiles, TML seems to have attracted more researchers from Meta than from any other single organization.<\/p>\n

Among the most notable is Soumith Chintala, TML\u2019s CTO, who spent 11 years at Meta and co-founded PyTorch, the widely-used open source deep learning framework that forms the foundation for much of today\u2019s AI research. He departed Meta in late 2025 and took on the CTO role earlier this year. Piotr Doll\u00e1r, another 11-year veteran of Meta who served as research director and co-authored the seminal Segment Anything model, is now part of TML\u2019s technical team. Andrea Madotto, a research scientist in Meta\u2019s FAIR division with a focus on multimodal language models, joined TML in December. James Sun, a software engineer with almost nine years at Meta concentrating on LLM pre- and post-training, also made the switch.<\/p>\n

TML has also recruited talent from outside Meta. Neal Wu \u2014 a three-time gold medalist at the International Olympiad in Informatics and a founding member of the popular coding startup Cognition \u2014 came on board earlier this year. Jeffrey Tao transitioned from Waymo, Windsurf, and OpenAI. Muhammad Maaz previously held a research fellowship at Anthropic. Erik Wijmans joined from Apple. Liliang Ren spent two and a half years with Microsoft\u2019s AI Superintelligence group pre-training OpenAI models for code before coming on board in March.<\/p>\n

The startup currently employs around 140 people.<\/p>\n

\n
\n

Techcrunch event<\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco, CA<\/span>
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t|<\/span>
\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

Meta\u2019s compensation packages \u2014 reaching seven figures without conditions \u2014 are now widely recognized. For researchers assessing their alternatives, the equation might be straightforward: Thinking Machines Lab is presently valued at $12 billion. While this amount may seem extraordinary for a company at this stage during any prior tech cycle (having launched only one product thus far), in comparison to the record valuations of OpenAI and Anthropic, the financial potential remains substantial.<\/p>\n

Contacted on Friday morning, a representative from TML opted not to provide comments for this article.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn\u2019t affect our editorial independence.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

<\/div>\n
\n

Weiyao Wang dedicated eight years to Meta \u2014 his inaugural position after college \u2014 assisting in the development of multimodal perception frameworks and taking part in open-world segmentation initiatives, including SAM3D. His last day at Meta occurred last week, and he has now transitioned to Thinking Machines Lab (TML).<\/p>\n

Wang’s transition to TML coincides with the AI startup’s expansion across various sectors. It recently secured a multibillion-dollar cloud agreement with Google, granting it access to Nvidia\u2019s newest GB300 chips and positioning it as one of the initial startups to utilize this hardware.<\/p>\n

The contract, revealed this past Tuesday at Google Cloud Next, follows a prior collaboration with Nvidia, placing TML alongside Anthropic and Meta in the equivalent infrastructure category. (Meta reportedly considered acquiring Thinking Machines around the same time last year and has recently been recruiting TML\u2019s founders individually.)<\/p>\n

The landscape of talent is shifting. Wang and Kenneth Li \u2014 a Harvard PhD who spent 10 months at Meta before joining TML this month \u2014 exemplify a two-way talent exchange. Business Insider indicated last week that Meta has now recruited seven of TML\u2019s founding members. An examination of recent hires suggests Thinking Machines is also actively recruiting from Meta. Based on a review of LinkedIn profiles, TML seems to have attracted more researchers from Meta than from any other single organization.<\/p>\n

Among the most notable is Soumith Chintala, TML\u2019s CTO, who spent 11 years at Meta and co-founded PyTorch, the widely-used open source deep learning framework that forms the foundation for much of today\u2019s AI research. He departed Meta in late 2025 and took on the CTO role earlier this year. Piotr Doll\u00e1r, another 11-year veteran of Meta who served as research director and co-authored the seminal Segment Anything model, is now part of TML\u2019s technical team. Andrea Madotto, a research scientist in Meta\u2019s FAIR division with a focus on multimodal language models, joined TML in December. James Sun, a software engineer with almost nine years at Meta concentrating on LLM pre- and post-training, also made the switch.<\/p>\n

TML has also recruited talent from outside Meta. Neal Wu \u2014 a three-time gold medalist at the International Olympiad in Informatics and a founding member of the popular coding startup Cognition \u2014 came on board earlier this year. Jeffrey Tao transitioned from Waymo, Windsurf, and OpenAI. Muhammad Maaz previously held a research fellowship at Anthropic. Erik Wijmans joined from Apple. Liliang Ren spent two and a half years with Microsoft\u2019s AI Superintelligence group pre-training OpenAI models for code before coming on board in March.<\/p>\n

The startup currently employs around 140 people.<\/p>\n

\n
\n

Techcrunch event<\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco, CA<\/span>
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t|<\/span>
\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

Meta\u2019s compensation packages \u2014 reaching seven figures without conditions \u2014 are now widely recognized. For researchers assessing their alternatives, the equation might be straightforward: Thinking Machines Lab is presently valued at $12 billion. While this amount may seem extraordinary for a company at this stage during any prior tech cycle (having launched only one product thus far), in comparison to the record valuations of OpenAI and Anthropic, the financial potential remains substantial.<\/p>\n

Contacted on Friday morning, a representative from TML opted not to provide comments for this article.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn\u2019t affect our editorial independence.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3489509,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"Default","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3489508","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/techingeek.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3489508"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/techingeek.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/techingeek.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techingeek.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techingeek.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3489508"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/techingeek.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3489508\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techingeek.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3489509"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/techingeek.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3489508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techingeek.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3489508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techingeek.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3489508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}