Meta has now hired 7 founding members from $12 billion Thinking Machines Lab

So Meta has now poached seven founding members from the $12 billion Thinking Machines Lab, which is about as subtle as a wrecking ball to a startup's founding DNA. The latest two departures bring the total to nearly half of the original founding team, with a third employee – a widely-cited AI researcher – also jumping ship. It's the kind of aggressive talent raid that makes you wonder if Meta's 'open AI' philosophy extends to opening other companies' talent rosters with a corporate-sized cheque book.

This isn't just poaching – it's systematic dismantling. The $12 billion valuation of Thinking Machines Lab suddenly looks like a price tag for a parts catalogue, with Meta cherry-picking the very architects who built the thing. When a startup loses seven founding members and key researchers to one competitor, it's not a 'shakeup' – it's a controlled demolition dressed up as career advancement. The fact that this is happening as the lab faces 'aggressive poaching efforts' suggests someone at Meta has decided the most efficient R&D strategy is to let others do the foundational work, then hire away the people who actually understand it.

What's particularly delicious is watching this unfold against the backdrop of Meta's own recent workforce 'optimisation', where 8,000 employees were deemed surplus because projects that 'used to require big teams' can now be handled by 'a single talented person.' Apparently, those single talented persons are being sourced from $12 billion startups rather than cultivated internally. It's a perfect corporate two-step: fire thousands while simultaneously spending fortunes to hire the exact people who might make those roles redundant elsewhere. The circular logic would be impressive if it weren't so brutally efficient.