2 founding members of Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab quietly left for Meta

Thinking Machines Lab, the ambitious venture led by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, has experienced a significant talent drain as two founding members have recently transitioned to Meta. This departure marks the latest in a series of exits from the organization, which secured a remarkable $2 billion funding round at a valuation of $12 billion last year. Based in San Francisco, Thinking Machines Lab is dedicated to assisting developers in creating custom AI models. However, it has been grappling with a wave of talent poaching from larger tech and AI firms, particularly from Meta and OpenAI. The two recent departures, Christian Gibson and Noah Shpak, were previously listed as founding members on the lab’s earlier website. Sources indicate that both have been employed at Meta for several weeks now. Gibson, a former engineer at OpenAI, is an expert in supercomputers utilized for training AI models and played a role in the development of the original ChatGPT. Meanwhile, Shpak brings experience as an AI engineer from Character.AI and X (previously Twitter). This follows the earlier departure of another co-founder, Andrew Tulloch, who also joined Meta last year. Moreover, the lab recently lost its CTO, Barret Zoph, along with co-founder Luke Metz to OpenAI, in addition to two other researchers. Notably, Jolene Parish, a founding member specializing in security, has also departed, as reported by Business Insider. Despite these challenges, Thinking Machines Lab continues to attract high-caliber talent, having recently recruited Neal Wu, a distinguished coder who has earned three gold medals in programming Olympiads, and Soumith Chintala, the creator of the widely used open-source AI project PyTorch, who now serves as the lab's CTO. Both Meta and Thinking Machines Lab have opted not to comment on these developments.