Meta has poached two more founding members from Thinking Machines, bringing the total to seven people who have left.

ME News report, April 21 (UTC+8). According to Beating monitoring, Thinking Machines Lab (TML) is an AI startup founded last year by OpenAI’s former CTO Mira Murati. It has a valuation of $12 billion, has completed $2 billion in funding, and has grown to 130 employees.

Business Insider exclusively reported on April 20 that three more employees from TML have moved to Meta: Mark Jen and Yinghai Lu, both members of the founding team, as well as researcher Tianyi Zhang. Jen is a software engineer who previously worked at Meta; Lu has worked at both Meta and OpenAI, and her research direction is inference, which directly determines whether the multi-step reasoning for chatbots can actually run. Zhang is not part of the founding team, and has had authorship on many widely cited papers. None of the three updated their employer on LinkedIn, and BI confirmed this through two sources familiar with the matter.

Including these three, BI has confirmed that at least seven founding team members at TML have jumped to Meta, including Joshua Gross, who built and launched TML’s flagship product Tinker. OpenAI has also recruited founding member and security engineer Jolene Parish.

The directions of inflow and outflow are exactly the opposite. The current CTO, Soumith Chintala, is the creator of the open-source project PyTorch; last year he left Meta and joined TML. Around the same time, TML also quietly hired Neal Wu, who won three gold medals at the programming olympiads. Top researchers are still willing to join TML, but among the founding team, the engineering backbone that turns research into products has been the fastest group to be poached back by Meta.

(Source: BlockBeats)