Weiyao Wang, who dedicated eight years to Meta immediately after graduating, has recently transitioned to Thinking Machines Lab (TML). At Meta, he played a vital role in the development of multimodal perception systems and open-world segmentation projects, including SAM3D. His departure from Meta marked the end of an era as he embarks on his new journey with TML.
TML is currently experiencing significant growth following the announcement of a multibillion-dollar cloud partnership with Google, which grants the startup access to Nvidia’s latest GB300 chips. This collaboration positions TML alongside other major players, such as Anthropic and Meta, within the same advanced infrastructure tier. Interestingly, last year, Meta reportedly explored the possibility of acquiring TML and has more recently been recruiting TML’s founders.
The dynamics of talent acquisition between these tech giants are notably fluid. Wang, along with Kenneth Li—a Harvard PhD who also recently joined TML—illustrates the ongoing tug-of-war for skilled individuals. Reports suggest that Meta has recently recruited a number of TML’s founding members. In response, TML appears to be targeting Meta’s talent pool more aggressively than any other employer, as evident from LinkedIn insights.
Noteworthy hires at TML include Soumith Chintala, the company’s CTO and a co-founder of the PyTorch framework, who left Meta late last year after an 11-year tenure. Other significant additions include Piotr Dollár, another Meta veteran who contributed to the Segment Anything model, and Andrea Madotto, who specialised in multimodal language models at Meta’s FAIR division. Additionally, James Sun, with nearly a decade at Meta, has also made the switch.
However, TML’s recruitment strategy extends beyond former Meta employees. They have onboarded notable talents like Neal Wu, a three-time gold medalist at the International Olympiad in Informatics, and Jeffrey Tao, who previously worked with Waymo and OpenAI. Muhammad Maaz, Erik Wijmans, and Liliang Ren, with experience at Anthropic and Apple, also joined TML, which now boasts a workforce of approximately 140.
Moreover, with Meta’s lucrative pay packages, often exceeding seven figures, researchers weighing their options might find TML’s valuation of $12 billion hard to ignore, especially given the market dynamics that have seen other AI firms, such as OpenAI and Anthropic, achieve unprecedented valuations. TML’s rapid ascent, despite having just launched one product, signals strong potential for financial growth in the increasingly competitive AI landscape.
As TML continues to develop, it seems poised to carve out a significant niche in the tech industry, even as competition intensifies between established players and emerging startups alike.
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