Thinking Machines Lab, the high-profile Ai startup led by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati has now lost two more founding members to Meta, intensifying econcersna bout a talent drain. According to a report by Christian Gibson and Noah Shpak, both listed as part of the company’s founding team on earlier versions of its website have already started working at Meta. For those unaware, Christian Gibson is a former OpenAI engineer who helped[ed in building the first ChatGPT model and specialises in supercomputers for AI training. On the other hand, Noah Shpak is an AI engineer with prior stints at Character.AI and X (formerly known as Twitter). The exits of the two executives follow a string of high-profile departures, including cofounder Andrew Tulloch to Meta), CTO Barret Zoph and cofounder Luke Metz (to OpenAI), along with several researchers and founding member Jolene Parish, who specialized in security.Last month, chief technology officer of Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab Barret Zoph left the company to go back to OpenAI. Murati then shared a post on microblogging platform X (formerly Twitter) confirming the departure. “We have parted ways with Barret Zoph”. She continued: “Soumith Chintala will be the new CTO of Thinking Machines. He is a brilliant and seasoned leader who has made important contributions to the AI field for over a decade, and he’s been a major contributor to our team. We could not be more excited to have him take on this new responsibility,” she then wrote.

A startup under pressure

Thinking Machines Lab, based in San Francisco, raised $2 billion at a $12 billion valuation last year, positioning itself as a major player in custom AI model development. But the company has faced aggressive poaching from larger rivals like Meta and OpenAI, both of which are competing fiercely for top AI talent.Despite the exodus, the startup has also attracted notable hires, including Neal Wu, a decorated Olympiad programmer, and Soumith Chintala, creator of PyTorch, who now serves as its CTO.The departures highlight the intense competition among AI companies for elite engineers and researchers. Meta, in particular, has been expanding its AI research teams, while OpenAI continues to lure talent with its frontier model projects.