Multimodal · TechCrunch AI
Meta’s loss is Thinking Machines’ gain
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Weiyao Wang spent eight years at Meta — his first job out of college, helping build multimodal perception systems and contributing to open-world segmentation projects, including SAM3D.
Key facts
- For researchers weighing their other options, the calculus may be as simple as this: Thinking Machines Lab is right now valued at $12 billion
- The most prominent is Soumith Chintala, TML’s CTO, who spent 11 years at Meta and co-founded PyTorch, the open source deep learning framework that now underpins most of the world’s AI research
- Piotr Dollár, another 11-year Meta veteran who served as research director and co-authored the influential Segment Anything model, is now on TML’s technical staff
- Wang and Kenneth Li — a Harvard PhD who spent 10 months at Meta before joining TML this month — are the latest examples of a talent grab that runs in both directions
Summary
His move to TML comes as the AI startup expands on multiple fronts. The agreement, announced this past Tuesday at Google Cloud Next, follows an earlier partnership with Nvidia, and puts TML in the same infrastructure tier as Anthropic and Meta. (Meta reportedly held talks to acquire Thinking Machines around this time last year and has more recently been picking off TML’s founders one by one.) The talent picture remains fluid. Business Insider reported last week that Meta has now poached seven of TML’s founding members. The most prominent is Soumith Chintala, TML’s CTO, who spent 11 years at Meta and co-founded PyTorch, the open source deep learning framework that now underpins most of the world’s AI research.