Weiyao Wang, a seasoned expert in multimodal perception systems and open-world segmentation projects, including SAM3D, has concluded an impactful eight-year tenure at Meta, his inaugural professional role post-college. His departure from Meta last week marks his immediate transition to Thinking Machines Lab.
This strategic hire aligns with Thinking Machines Lab's (TML) significant expansion across multiple fronts. The AI startup recently secured a multibillion-dollar cloud agreement with Google, granting it exclusive access to Nvidia’s cutting-edge GB300 chips and positioning it among the first startups globally to operate on this advanced hardware.
The landmark Google deal, unveiled this past Tuesday at Google Cloud Next, builds upon a prior partnership with Nvidia, elevating TML to the same elite infrastructure tier as industry leaders like Anthropic and Meta. Interestingly, Meta reportedly engaged in acquisition discussions with Thinking Machines approximately a year ago and has more recently been recruiting TML's founding members.
The landscape of top-tier AI talent remains highly dynamic. Wang’s arrival, alongside Kenneth Li — a Harvard PhD who spent ten months at Meta before joining TML this month — exemplifies a fierce, bidirectional talent acquisition battle. Business Insider recently reported Meta's successful recruitment of seven of TML's founding members. Conversely, a review of recent hires indicates Thinking Machines is actively recruiting from Meta in return. LinkedIn profile analysis suggests TML has attracted more researchers from Meta than from any other single employer.
Among the most prominent individuals TML has onboarded from Meta is Soumith Chintala, now TML’s CTO. Chintala, who dedicated 11 years to Meta and co-founded PyTorch — the open-source deep learning framework foundational to much of the world's AI research — left Meta in late 2025 and was appointed CTO earlier this year. Piotr Dollár, another 11-year Meta veteran who served as a research director and co-authored the influential Segment Anything model, has also joined TML’s technical staff. Andrea Madotto, a research scientist from Meta’s FAIR division specializing in multimodal language models, moved to TML in December. James Sun, a software engineer with nearly nine years at Meta focusing on LLM pre- and post-training, also made the move.
Thinking Machines Lab's ability to attract talent extends beyond Meta. Neal Wu, a three-time gold medalist at the International Olympiad in Informatics and a founding member of the notable coding startup Cognition, joined TML early this year. Jeffrey Tao brings experience from Waymo, Windsurf, and OpenAI. Muhammad Maaz previously held a research fellowship at Anthropic. Erik Wijmans transitioned 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.
The startup’s current headcount now stands at approximately 140 employees.
While Meta's seven-figure, no-strings-attached pay packages are widely recognized, researchers evaluating their options might consider TML's financial prospects. Thinking Machines Lab is currently valued at $12 billion. Although such a valuation would have been unprecedented for a company at this stage in previous tech cycles (having released just one product to date), it still presents significant financial upside when compared to the record-breaking valuations of OpenAI and Anthropic.
When contacted on Friday morning, a spokesperson for TML declined to provide a comment for this story.
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