Thinking Machines Lab faces more turnover.
The $12 billion AI startup founded by former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati has lost three more employees to Meta.
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, focusing on inference to help AI chatbots reason.
A third Thinking Machines Lab employee, Tianyi Zhang, also currently works at Meta. Although Zhang is an AI researcher, he is not a founding member, but he is a co-author of a widely cited academic paper.
None of the three have disclosed on LinkedIn that they work for Meta. Business Insider confirmed their departure through two sources familiar with the matter.
It’s unclear exactly what the three are doing at Meta or when they joined. Thinking Machines Lab and Meta both declined to comment.
The trio are the latest in a series of departures from the high-profile startup, which was founded last year and raised a whopping $2 billion in funding. Although it is known as a hotbed for AI talent, it is facing aggressive recruitment efforts from Silicon Valley.
Specifically, Business Insider has previously confirmed that Meta has hired seven members of the startup’s founding team, including Joshua Gross, who built and shipped its flagship product, Tinker. Meanwhile, OpenAI has hired founding member and security engineer Jolene Parish.
Thinking Machines Lab is also home to some of the leading figures in AI.
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 secretly hired Neil Wu, a programmer who won three gold medals at the Programming Olympics, Business Insider previously reported.
The startup has now more than quadrupled its workforce to 130 people, a person familiar with the matter previously said.
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