Thinking Machines Lab (TML) is expanding rapidly in 2026, securing a multibillion-dollar cloud deal with Google and pulling in a string of researchers from Meta, even as Meta has poached seven of TML’s own founding members.
The Google Cloud agreement, announced at Google Cloud Next on Tuesday, April 22, 2026, gives TML access to Nvidia’s latest GB300 chips, making it one of the first startups to run on the hardware. The deal follows an earlier partnership with Nvidia and places TML in the same infrastructure tier as Anthropic and Meta.
On the talent front, Weiyao Wang — who spent eight years at Meta building multimodal perception systems and contributing to open-world segmentation projects including SAM3D — left Meta last week and has since joined TML. Kenneth Li, a Harvard PhD who spent 10 months at Meta, also joined TML this month.
They are part of a broader pattern. A review of LinkedIn profiles suggests TML has been hiring more researchers from Meta than from any other single employer. 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. He left Meta in late 2025 and was appointed CTO earlier in 2026. Piotr Dollár, another 11-year Meta veteran and co-author of the Segment Anything model, is now on TML’s technical staff. Andrea Madotto, a research scientist from Meta’s FAIR division, joined in December, and James Sun, a software engineer with nearly nine years at Meta, also made the move.
TML has also drawn talent from other organizations. Neal Wu, a three-time gold medalist at the International Olympiad in Informatics and a founding member of coding startup Cognition, joined early this year. Jeffrey Tao came via Waymo, Windsurf, and OpenAI. Muhammad Maaz previously held a research fellowship at Anthropic. Erik Wijmans arrived from Apple. Liliang Ren, who spent two and a half years on Microsoft’s AI Superintelligence team pre-training OpenAI models for code, joined in March.
The startup’s headcount now stands at around 140. TML is currently valued at $12 billion — a figure that, compared with the record-breaking valuations of OpenAI and Anthropic, may still represent significant financial upside for researchers considering the move, particularly given that TML has released just one product so far. Meta reportedly held talks to acquire TML around this time last year. A TML spokesperson declined to comment when reached on Friday.
Source: TechCrunch