Soumith Chintala, the co-creator of PyTorch, has joined Mira Murati's AI startup, Thinking Machines Lab, following significant changes at Meta's AI division. Chintala's departure comes after a restructuring at Meta, where the company has been overhauling its AI efforts and hiring talent from competitors like OpenAI and Google DeepMind. He announced his new role on social media, emphasizing the impressive team at Thinking Machines Lab, which aims to focus on human-AI collaboration. Thinking Machines Lab has been aggressively recruiting top researchers, with early hires including John Schulman and Alec Radford, both notable figures in AI development. The startup recently raised $2 billion in seed funding at a valuation of $10 billion and is pursuing additional funding that could push its valuation to $50 billion. Reports suggest that some technical positions at the company offer salaries up to $500,000, reflecting the competitive nature of the current AI talent market. Chintala's move marks a new chapter after more than a decade at Meta, where he helped establish PyTorch as a leading AI framework. In a farewell post, he expressed readiness for new challenges and indicated that PyTorch is now stable enough to thrive independently. Although Thinking Machines hasn’t fully launched its product suite yet, its initial tool, Tinker, is already being used by prominent researchers at institutions like Princeton and Stanford. The company faces challenges, including recent staff departures, but its rapid growth and high-profile hires signal its ambitions in the AI research space.