Meta’s loss is Pondering Machines’ acquire

Weiyao Wang spent eight years at Meta — his first job out of faculty — serving to construct multimodal notion programs and contributing to open-world segmentation tasks, together with SAM3D. His closing day at Meta was final week, and he has since joined Pondering Machines Lab (TML).

His transfer to TML comes because the AI startup expands on a number of fronts. It simply signed a multibillion-dollar cloud take care of Google, giving it entry to Nvidia’s newest GB300 chips and making it one of many first startups to run on the {hardware}.

The settlement, introduced this previous Tuesday at Google Cloud Subsequent, follows an earlier partnership with Nvidia, and places TML in the identical infrastructure tier as Anthropic and Meta. (Meta reportedly held talks to amass Pondering Machines round this time last year and has extra just lately been selecting off TML’s founders one after the other.)

The expertise image stays fluid. Wang and Kenneth Li — a Harvard PhD who spent 10 months at Meta earlier than becoming a member of TML this month — are the most recent examples of a expertise seize that runs in each instructions. Enterprise Insider reported final week that Meta has now poached seven of TML’s founding members. A evaluate of latest hires reveals Pondering Machines is raiding Meta proper again. Not less than, it seems based mostly on a evaluate of LinkedIn profiles, that TML has been hiring extra researchers from Meta than from some other single employer.

Essentially the most outstanding is Soumith Chintala, TML’s CTO, who spent 11 years at Meta and co-founded PyTorch, the open supply deep studying framework that now underpins a lot of the world’s AI analysis. He left Meta in late 2025 and was appointed CTO earlier this 12 months. Piotr Dollár, one other 11-year Meta veteran who served as analysis director and co-authored the influential Phase Something mannequin, is now on TML’s technical employees. Andrea Madotto, a analysis scientist in Meta’s FAIR division centered on multimodal language fashions, joined TML in December. James Solar, a software program engineer with practically 9 years at Meta engaged on LLM pre- and post-training, additionally made the bounce.

TML has drawn expertise from past Meta, too. Neal Wu — a three-time gold medalist on the Worldwide Olympiad in Informatics and a founding member of the buzzy coding startup Cognition — joined early this 12 months. Jeffrey Tao got here by way of Waymo, Windsurf, and OpenAI. Muhammad Maaz beforehand held a analysis fellowship at Anthropic. Erik Wijmans arrived from Apple. Liliang Ren spent two and a half years on Microsoft’s AI Superintelligence crew pre-training OpenAI fashions for code earlier than becoming a member of in March.

The startup’s headcount now stands at round 140.

Meta’s pay packages — seven figures, no strings connected — are well-known by now. For researchers weighing their different choices, the calculus could also be so simple as this: Pondering Machines Lab is true now valued at $12 billion. Although that determine would’ve been unimaginable for an organization at this stage in any earlier tech cycle (it has launched simply one product to date), in contrast with the record-breaking valuations of OpenAI and Anthropic, there’s nonetheless loads of monetary upside.

Reached Friday morning, a spokesperson for TML declined to remark for this story.