Thinking Machines Lab is facing more departures.
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The $12 billion AI startup founded by OpenAI’s former CTO, Mira Murati, has lost another three employees to Meta.
Two — Mark Jen and Yinghai Lu — were part of the startup’s founding team. Jen is a software engineer who previously worked at Meta. Lu previously worked at Meta and OpenAI and focuses on inference, which helps AI chatbots with reasoning.
A third Thinking Machines Lab employee, Tianyi Zhang, now also works at Meta. Zhang, an AI researcher who is not a founding member, has coauthored widely cited academic papers.
None of the three publicly disclosed on LinkedIn that they work at Meta. Business Insider confirmed their departures through two sources familiar with the matter.
It’s not clear exactly what the three do at Meta, or when they joined. Both Thinking Machines Lab and Meta declined to comment.
The trio has become the latest in a string of departures from the high-profile startup, which launched last year and raised a huge $2 billion funding round. Known as a hotbed of AI talent, it has faced aggressive recruiting efforts from Silicon Valley.
Meta, in particular, has hired seven members of the startup’s founding team, Business Insider has so far confirmed — including Joshua Gross, who built and shipped its flagship product, Tinker. OpenAI, meanwhile, hired founding member and security engineer Jolene Parish.
Thinking Machines Lab has also attracted leading AI figures.
Its current CTO, Soumith Chintala, left Meta to join the startup and is the creator of the open-source AI project PyTorch. Thinking Machines Lab also quietly hired Neal Wu, a coder who won three gold medals in a programming Olympiad, Business Insider previously reported.
The startup’s head count has more than quadrupled to 130 so far, a person familiar with the matter previously said.
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