The AI talent war between Meta and Thinking Machines Lab (TML) is heating up, with researchers moving in both directions. Weiyao Wang, a researcher who spent eight years at Meta working on multimodal perception and open-world segmentation projects including SAM3D, left Meta last week to join TML. His move follows a recent flurry of hires: Harvard PhD Kenneth Li, who spent just 10 months at Meta, also joined TML this month.
TML is expanding rapidly, having recently signed a multibillion-dollar cloud deal with Google that grants access to Nvidia's latest GB300 chips, placing it in the same infrastructure tier as Anthropic and Meta. Meta reportedly held talks to acquire TML last year and has been poaching its founding members—Business Insider reported that Meta has now taken seven of TML's founders. However, a review of LinkedIn profiles shows that TML has been hiring more researchers from Meta than from any other single employer. The most prominent example is Soumith Chintala, TML's CTO, who spent 11 years at Meta and co-founded PyTorch.
As both companies strengthen their AI teams, the talent battle shows no signs of slowing down.