Soumith Chintala, the creator of PyTorch and one of the most influential figures in modern AI, has officially joined Mira Murati’s rapidly growing startup, Thinking Machines Lab. Confirming the move on X, Chintala said the people at the company are “incredible,” marking the beginning of a new chapter after an eleven-year tenure at Meta. His arrival strengthens Thinking Machines Lab’s momentum as it brings in top talent from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and leading academic institutions, all focused on advancing human–AI collaboration.

Chintala’s transition comes amid major restructuring within Meta’s AI organisation, which is regrouping under the new Superintelligence Labs division led by Alexandr Wang. Reports of Yann LeCun’s impending exit and Meta’s aggressive hiring from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Apple set the backdrop for Chintala’s departure. In his farewell note, he wrote that PyTorch had expanded into a framework “used in production at virtually every major AI company and in classrooms from MIT to rural India,” and that it had reached a point where it could “thrive without him.”

Meanwhile, Thinking Machines Lab is quickly becoming one of the most ambitious names in the sector, drawing in leaders like John Schulman, Alec Radford, and Bob McGrew, while reportedly offering compensation packages reaching half a million dollars. With a $2 billion seed round behind it and discussions underway for a valuation near $50 billion, the company has already begun rolling out products like Tinker—now adopted at Princeton, Stanford, and by a growing base of early enterprise users.