Thinking Machines Lab Co-Founder Departs for Meta (www.wsj.com)

Andrew Tulloch, a co‑founder and prominent researcher at AI startup Thinking Machines Lab, has left the company for a role at Meta, according to people familiar with the matter and a note he sent to employees. The move marks another high‑profile transfer of talent from a smaller research lab into a major platform company, underscoring continued competition for top AI researchers as Big Tech scales R&D and productizes advanced models. For the AI/ML community the significance is twofold: near‑term, Meta gains experienced research capability that can accelerate its work on model architectures, training infrastructure, or applied systems engineering; longer‑term, the shift reinforces industry dynamics around talent concentration, IP control and the tension between open academic‑style research and proprietary product development. Technically, such hires typically bring expertise in model scaling, optimization and deployment — areas that can influence how quickly new techniques move from papers to production. The departure also raises strategic questions for Thinking Machines Lab about retention and fundraising, and for the field about where cutting‑edge research will be incubated and shared going forward.