Meta is building its artificial general intelligence team at a rapid pace. The company has now hired the fifth founding member from Thinking Machines Lab, the 12 billion dollar AI startup founded by former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati. This move is part of a larger talent war that is reshaping the AI industry behind the scenes.
Mark Zuckerberg has made his intentions clear. In September, he personally recruited Mira Murati and several of her top team members to join Meta. The details were kept quiet at first, but the full picture is now emerging.
Who Meta Has Hired
Thinking Machines Lab was created by some of the brightest minds in AI. Meta has targeted these founders directly. The latest hire is Joshua Gross, a veteran engineer who built the startup’s flagship product Tinker from scratch. He has now joined Meta Superintelligence Labs to lead engineering teams.
This is not a coincidence. It is a deliberate and aggressive talent raid.
Meta has now hired five founding members from the 12 billion dollar startup. The list keeps growing.
Before this, Meta successfully recruited Andrew Tulloch, another cofounder of Thinking Machines Lab. The pattern is clear. Meta is systematically pulling talent from one of the most promising AI startups in Silicon Valley.
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OpenAI has not stayed silent either. The former chief technology officer Barret Zoph and top security researcher Jolyn Parrish have also left Thinking Machines Lab. Zoph returned to OpenAI, while Parrish joined Anthropic.
Last year, Thinking Machines raised 2 billion dollars at a 12 billion dollar valuation. It was one of the largest funding rounds for an AI startup. The company grew from just 30 people to over 130 employees. Now its founding team is being dismantled piece by piece.
The Talent War Goes Both Ways
While Meta is hiring from Thinking Machines Lab, the startup is fighting back. It has quietly recruited several top engineers from Meta, including some of the most important figures in modern AI.
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The most significant hire is Soumith Chintala, who spent 11 years at Meta and co-created PyTorch. PyTorch is the open source deep learning framework that powers most AI research worldwide. Chintala left Meta in late 2025 and is now chief technology officer at Thinking Machines Lab.
Piotr Dollar, another 11-year Meta veteran who co-authored the influential Segment Anything model, has also joined Thinking Machines Lab’s technical staff. Other Meta alumni who made the switch include Andrea Madotto from Meta’s AI research division and James Sun, a software engineer with nearly nine years at Meta working on large language models.
Thinking Machines Lab has also hired talent from beyond Meta. Neal Wu, a three-time gold medalist at the International Olympiad for Informatics and a founding member of coding startup Cognition, joined earlier this year. The startup’s headcount now stands at around 140 people.
One side loses blood. The other side gains blood. The 12 billion dollar startup with 130 team members is now caught in the middle of this fight.
Why This Talent War Is Different
The AI talent war is not new. What makes this battle different is the scale and the personal nature of the conflict.
Mira Murati left OpenAI less than a year ago and immediately became a target. Meta began recruiting her team as early as February, just months after she started her own company. Two other founding members, Christian Gibson and Noah Shpak, had already left by then. The industry was already buzzing with rumors.
Meta is not using traditional recruiting methods. Zuckerberg is making personal calls. He is offering packages worth millions of dollars with no strings attached. He is treating this like an acquisition without buying the company.
Thinking Machines Lab is not a typical startup either. It raised 2 billion dollars in funding and has a 12 billion dollar valuation. Yet it cannot keep its founding team together. The 130-person team is now facing an existential threat.
What This Means for the AI Industry
This is not just about one company losing employees. It reveals a deeper shift in how the AI industry operates.
We have entered what industry insiders call the AI talent doomsday. The most valuable asset in AI is no longer algorithms or computing power. It is the people who create them.
Meta’s strategy is clear. Instead of acquiring startups, it is acquiring their founding teams directly. This approach is faster, cheaper, and avoids regulatory scrutiny. Zuckerberg has turned Meta into a talent vacuum, sucking up the best minds from every promising AI startup.
The numbers tell the story. Meta has reportedly offered signing bonuses as high as 100 million dollars to lure top AI researchers. Average stock-based compensation at leading AI startups has reached 1.5 million dollars per employee. The battle centers on a small pool of fewer than 1,000 AI research scientists who can build the most advanced large language models.
For Thinking Machines Lab, the challenge is existential. A startup without its founding team is like a body without its skeleton. The remaining employees may have the skills, but they lack the original vision and leadership that made the company special.
The Bigger Picture
This talent war reflects a fundamental truth about the AI race. Companies are not competing on technology alone. They are competing on their ability to attract and retain the best people.
Meta has an advantage that startups cannot match. It has deep pockets, stable revenue from its social media business, and the ability to offer seven-figure salaries without blinking. Startups like Thinking Machines Lab may have higher valuations on paper, but they cannot compete with Meta’s cash flow.
The irony is that Thinking Machines Lab itself was built by poaching talent from OpenAI and Meta. Mira Murati hired several of her former OpenAI colleagues. The startup also recruited heavily from Meta’s AI research division. Now the same tactics are being used against it.
Some industry observers worry that this talent war will stifle innovation. If the best researchers keep moving between the same few big companies, smaller startups will struggle to survive. The AI ecosystem could become dominated by a handful of giants, reducing diversity and competition.
What Happens Next
The situation is still developing. Thinking Machines Lab has signed a multibillion-dollar cloud deal with Google, giving it access to Nvidia’s latest chips. It has also formed a partnership with Nvidia. These moves suggest the startup is trying to build infrastructure strength to compensate for its talent losses.
However, the core problem remains. A 12 billion dollar valuation means nothing if the people who created the value have left. Investors may start questioning whether Thinking Machines Lab can deliver on its promises without its original team.
For Meta, the strategy is working. It is building one of the strongest AI teams in the world without spending billions on acquisitions. Zuckerberg’s personal involvement shows how seriously Meta takes this race.
The AI talent war is far from over. As one industry insider put it, this is not a battle between companies. It is a battle between the creators of AI and the companies that want to own them. In this war, the creators hold the power, but the companies hold the money.
Final Thoughts
Meta’s hiring of five Thinking Machines Lab founders is more than a recruiting success. It is a signal that the AI industry is entering a new phase where talent is the ultimate currency.
For startups, the lesson is clear. Raising billions and building a great product is not enough. You must also build a culture and compensation structure that keeps your best people from leaving. For big tech companies, the message is equally clear. The fastest way to win in AI is not to build from scratch. It is to hire the people who have already built something great.
The AI talent doomsday may just be beginning. As the race for artificial general intelligence heats up, the fight for the best minds will only get more intense.
