2 founding members of Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab quietly left for Meta
Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images
- Two founding team members left Thinking Machines Lab for Meta in recent weeks.
- The exits add to a wave of departures from the high-profile $12 billion AI startup.
- Meta and Thinking Machines Lab declined to comment on the hires.
Thinking Machines Lab, the high-profile startup run by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, has lost two more founding members to Meta.
The pair are the latest in a string of recent departures for Thinking Machines Lab, which raised a huge $2 billion round of financing at a $12 billion valuation last year. The startup, based in San Francisco and focused on helping developers custom-build AI models, has faced a wave of poaching by bigger tech and AI companies, namely Meta and OpenAI.
Christian Gibson and Noah Shpak are both listed as members of Thinking Machines Lab's founding team on an earlier version of its website. Both have been working at Meta for a few weeks, according to sources familiar with the matter.
Gibson is a former OpenAI engineer who specializes in supercomputers used for training AI models and who worked on the first ChatGPT model.
Shpak is an AI-focused engineer who previously worked at the startup Character.AI and at X (then known as Twitter).
Another Thinking Machines Lab cofounder, Andrew Tulloch, left for Meta last year. Last month, it lost its CTO, Barret Zoph, and Luke Metz, both cofounders, to OpenAI, along with two researchers. Thinking Machines Lab also lost Jolene Parish, a founding member who specializes in security, Business Insider reported.
Thinking Machines Lab has become known for attracting top AI talent. It quietly hired Neal Wu, a coder who won three gold medals in an Olympiad for programming, and Soumith Chintala, the creator of the open-source AI project PyTorch at Meta, who is now its CTO, Business Insider previously reported.
Meta and Thinking Machines Lab declined to comment.
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