Meta Poaches Founding Members from AI Startup
Meta is aggressively recruiting top AI talent, hiring two founding members from Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab. The move comes as the high-profile AI lab is in the middle of a massive $2 billion seed funding round, signaling intense competition for foundational AI experts.
The two individuals hired by Meta are Christian Gibson and Noah Shpak. Gibson, a former OpenAI engineer, specializes in the supercomputers used for training AI models and was involved in the original ChatGPT's development. Shpak is an AI-focused engineer with previous experience at Character.AI and X (formerly Twitter). This move makes a total of four founding members of Thinking Machines Lab who now work at Meta. Co-founder Andrew Tulloch joined Meta in 2025, and researcher Ian O'Connell also made the switch recently, highlighting a pattern of targeted recruiting from the high-profile startup. The talent drain at Thinking Machines isn't just a one-way street to Meta. The startup also recently lost its CTO, Barret Zoph, and another co-founder, Luke Metz, who both returned to OpenAI. The departures underscore the intense, multi-front talent war among top AI labs for a small pool of elite researchers. Thinking Machines Lab was founded in February 2025 by Mira Murati, the influential former CTO of OpenAI who led the development of products like ChatGPT and DALL-E. Murati's departure from OpenAI and the founding of her new lab followed the November 2023 leadership crisis where she briefly served as interim CEO. The startup launched with a record-shattering $2 billion seed funding round in July 2025, led by Andreessen Horowitz, which valued the company at $12 billion before it had a product. Investors included major hardware players like Nvidia and AMD, signaling deep industry belief in the founding team's vision. Despite the high-profile departures, Thinking Machines Lab has also made significant hires. The company recently brought on Soumith Chintala, the creator of the popular open-source AI framework PyTorch, to serve as its new CTO. Notably, Chintala joined from Meta. Meta's aggressive recruitment is part of a broader strategy to build out its "Superintelligence Labs" by acquiring top-tier talent. The company is reportedly offering massive compensation packages to cherry-pick key researchers from rivals, a tactic described as a "virtual selective aquihire" that avoids the overhead of formal M&A.
