Meta and Thinking Machines Lab trade AI researchers as hiring heats up

In short: Meta and Thinking Machines Lab are hiring AI researchers from each other, showing a back-and-forth talent fight.

What's going on

Meta has been hiring people who helped start Thinking Machines Lab (TML), a newer AI company. Business Insider reported that Meta has hired seven of TML’s founding members.

At the same time, TechCrunch reports that TML has been hiring people from Meta, including Weiyao Wang, who spent eight years at Meta and left last week. Another recent hire is Kenneth Li, who spent about 10 months at Meta before joining TML this month.

TechCrunch also points to several high-profile former Meta leaders now at TML. That includes CTO Soumith Chintala, who helped create PyTorch (a widely used set of building blocks for training AI, like a standard toolkit). Other former Meta staff mentioned include Piotr Dollár, Andrea Madotto, and James Sun.

TML is also growing in other ways. TechCrunch says it recently signed a multibillion-dollar cloud deal with Google, which gives it access to Nvidia’s latest GB300 chips (specialized computer parts used to train and run AI, like powerful engines for AI work). TML’s headcount is now around 140, according to the report.

What to watch

Pay and computing power are both pulling people around. Meta is known for very large pay packages, while TML is valued at about $12 billion and may look attractive to people who want to join a smaller company earlier. If TML continues to lock in big cloud and chip deals, and if Meta keeps paying top dollar, this back-and-forth recruiting is likely to continue.

Source: TechCrunch AI