Soumith Chintala, a former AI leader at Meta and one of the most influential figures in modern AI infrastructure, has joined former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati's startup, Thinking Machines Lab.
"[T]hinking machines…the people are incredible," Chintala posted to his X account on Tuesday. He also updated his X bio and LinkedIn profile to indicate that he is now working at the startup, marking his first move since leaving Meta earlier this month.
Chintala was one of the creators of PyTorch, an open-source AI framework developed at Facebook and widely used in tech and academia. He is a significant addition for Thinking Machines Lab, the fast-growing AI company Murati unveiled in February after her departure from OpenAI.
The startup, which positions itself as an AI research and product lab working on "human-AI collaboration," has spent the past few months recruiting top-tier talent from Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, and across academia.
Chintala left Meta amid major shifts in the company's AI ranks. Meta has spent the past year overhauling its AI efforts, hiring dozens of engineers and researchers from rival companies, including OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Apple, and reorganizing them into a new Superintelligence Labs division led by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang. Yann LeCun, Meta's chief AI scientist and the founder of FAIR, the research group that helped shape the early software and hardware infrastructure Chintala helped build, is reportedly preparing to leave the company.
Thinking Machines Lab declined to comment, and Chintala did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
Thinking Machines has been competing aggressively in the AI talent wars. Early hires and advisors include John Schulman, who co-led the development of ChatGPT; researcher Alec Radford; and Bob McGrew, OpenAI's former Chief Research Officer.
Thinking Machines has offered salaries as high as $500,000 for technical roles, according to federal H-1B filings reviewed by Business Insider, with multiple staffers earning between $450,000 and $500,000 before bonuses and equity.
The company raised a massive $2 billion seed round at a $10 billion valuation earlier this year, and is now in talks to raise funding at a valuation of $50 billion, Bloomberg reported.
For Chintala, the move comes just weeks after he publicly closed the book on his 11-year run at Meta, and nearly eight years leading PyTorch, which he helped build from scratch.
In a farewell post, he wrote that PyTorch grew into a tool used "in production at virtually every major AI company" and taught "in classrooms from MIT to rural India," and said he was ready to try "something small… something new… something uncomfortable."
He added that as long as AI continues evolving at a breakneck pace, PyTorch will "play catch up," and he felt the project was finally stable enough to thrive without him.
While Thinking Machines has not yet launched its full suite of products, its first tool, Tinker, a system that enables users to more easily fine-tune large language models for AI, is being used by researchers at Princeton and Stanford, as well as by early business customers.
The company has also weathered departures. Andrew Tulloch, a cofounder and former Meta researcher, left in October to rejoin Meta, The Wall Street Journal reported.
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