Thinking Machines Lab, an AI firm founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, had raised billions in capital while assembling one of the technology’s most elite teams. However, around a third of the team have since joined rivals.
Around 13 members of the founding team have left since its launch, according to Business Insider. Those departures include three of its six co-founders.
Thinking Machines Lab’s head count has more than quadrupled to over 150 people since it launched, a person familiar with the matter told Business Insider.
A major reason for the departures is massive packages offered by companies like Meta and OpenAI. Some of the offers given to founding members have reached well into nine figures, which comes to hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and stock over several years.
The Business Insider report mentions veteran software engineer Joshua Gross, who helped launch Thinking Machine Labs’ flagship product Tinker. Gross wrote in a LinkedIn post that he “had a blast” shaping Tinker’s early vision. After helping build and ship the product from “zero to one,” he’s no longer at Thinking Machines Lab.
READ: Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab hits $12 billion in valuation (July 16, 2025)
Meta, which considered buying Thinking Machines Lab last year, was the most aggressive in poaching talent. The company lured away seven founding team members, along with a star AI researcher. However, Thinking Machines Lab was not the only company targeted by Meta during its hiring spree last year — the Facebook-parent had also poached talent from other companies like OpenAI.
The race for elite AI talent has become hotter than ever across tech, said Sam Agre, co-founder of recruiting firm People In AI.
While the pool of people with hands-on experience building leading AI models and products is small, it runs deep at Thinking Machines Lab. It’s so difficult to poach rank-and-file workers from there that Agre said he has resorted to sending them LinkedIn messages with subject lines touting $1.5 million in cash compensation “and up.” That’s more than three times the annual salary for software engineers offered by Thinking Machines Labs on its careers page, which mentions a range of $350,000 and $475,000 a year.
READ: Inside Thinking Machines Lab: Murati’s $12 billion AI startup tackles reproducibility (September 11, 2025)
While the nine-figure offers are reminiscent of deals for major athletes, Big Tech firms like Meta covet people who can help them pull ahead in AI, Agre said.
“You don’t want to fall behind in that type of arms race,” he said.
Aside from Meta, OpenAI hired five founding members, and xAI hired one.
The Business Insider report also noted that Thinking Machines Lab has reached its “one-year cliff,” following which employees can leave without walking away empty-handed. However, the company still continues to attract talent. Earlier this year, Soumith Chintala, the creator of the open-source AI project PyTorch left Meta to join Thinking Machines Lab as its CTO.
On Monday, Thinking Machines Labs announced something called interaction models. These models, still being built, are expected to process inputs and generate responses at the same time so that it functions more like a phone call rather than a text chain.