{"id":596811,"date":"2026-04-21T03:35:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-21T03:35:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/596811\/"},"modified":"2026-04-21T03:35:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-21T03:35:09","slug":"meta-attracts-more-thinking-machines-lab-talent-in-ai-shakeup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/596811\/","title":{"rendered":"Meta Attracts More Thinking Machines Lab Talent in AI Shakeup"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thinking Machines Lab<\/a> is facing more departures.<\/p>\n

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The $12 billion AI startup founded by OpenAI’s former CTO, Mira Murati, has lost another three employees to Meta.<\/p>\n

Two \u2014 Mark Jen and Yinghai Lu \u2014 were part of the startup’s founding team. Jen is a software engineer who previously worked at Meta. Lu previously worked at Meta and OpenAI and focuses on inference, which helps AI chatbots with reasoning.<\/p>\n

A third Thinking Machines Lab employee, Tianyi Zhang, now also works at Meta. Zhang, an AI researcher who is not a founding member, has coauthored widely cited academic papers.<\/p>\n

None of the three publicly disclosed on LinkedIn that they work at Meta. Business Insider confirmed their departures through two sources familiar with the matter.<\/p>\n

It’s not clear exactly what the three do at Meta, or when they joined. Both Thinking Machines Lab and Meta declined to comment.<\/p>\n

The trio has become the latest in a string of departures from the high-profile startup, which launched last year and raised a huge $2 billion funding round<\/a>. Known as a hotbed of AI talent, it has faced aggressive recruiting efforts from Silicon Valley.<\/p>\n

Meta, in particular, has hired seven members of the startup’s founding team, Business Insider has so far confirmed \u2014 including Joshua Gross<\/a>, who built and shipped its flagship product, Tinker. OpenAI, meanwhile, hired founding member and security engineer Jolene Parish.<\/a><\/p>\n

Thinking Machines Lab has also attracted leading AI figures.<\/p>\n

Its current CTO, Soumith Chintala<\/a>, left Meta to join the startup and is the creator of the open-source AI project PyTorch. Thinking Machines Lab also quietly hired Neal Wu<\/a>, a coder who won three gold medals in a programming Olympiad, Business Insider previously reported.<\/p>\n

The startup’s head count has more than quadrupled to 130 so far, a person familiar with the matter previously said.<\/p>\n

Have a tip? Contact Charles Rollet via email at crollet@businessinsider.com<\/a> or on Signal and WhatsApp at 628-282-2811. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here’s our guide to sharing information securely<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Thinking Machines Lab is facing more departures. Loading audio narration… The $12 billion AI startup founded by OpenAI’s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":596812,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,44973,181,507,270,256742,256743,260045,260040,260042,18512,37460,1282,260041,1283,1599,74,260044,260043],"class_list":{"0":"post-596811","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-ai-startup","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-artificialintelligence","12":"tag-business-insider","13":"tag-contact-charles-rollet","14":"tag-crolletbusinessinsider","15":"tag-current-cto","16":"tag-machines-lab-talent","17":"tag-mark-jen","18":"tag-matter","19":"tag-member","20":"tag-meta","21":"tag-more-departure","22":"tag-openai","23":"tag-team","24":"tag-technology","25":"tag-tianyi-zhang","26":"tag-yinghai-lu"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596811","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=596811"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596811\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/596812"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=596811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=596811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=596811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}