In very interesting news, Thinking Machines Lab has landed Soumith Chintala, who had left Facebook earlier.

Reference: https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-soumith-chintala-mira-murati-thinking-machines-lab-pytorch-ai-2025-11

Who is Soumith Chintala + Why is it big news that he is joining Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab?

You can read all about Soumith Chintala at his website -> Soumith Chintala

1. Soumith Chintala is the co-creator of PyTorch (https://pytorch.org/). PyTorch is a deep learning library built on Python which simplifies the development of Machine Learning models.
2. PyTorch was originally developed by Meta Platforms’ AI group -> PyTorch – Wikipedia
3. Soumith Chintala studied under Yann LeCun and also worked with him at Facebook. You can see them both in this Fireside Video -> Yann LeCun & Soumith Chintala | Fireside Chat at PyTorch Developer Day 2021
4. He is also an early investor in Anthropic, Runway, 1X, Osmo, and Together.AI

What does Twitter have to say?

Some interesting tweets ->

1. Tanishq Mathew Abraham, Ph.D. on X: “The creator of PyTorch moves to THINKING MACHINES I was already so bullish on Thinking Machines, yet another reason to be even more bullish!” / X
2. Cody Blakeney on X: “Increasingly bullish on thinky. I think they picked a great time to go big on model customization and infra. 2-3 years ago was too early. The talent density is insane.” / X
3. Miles Brundage on X: “People who were questioning TML’s valuation specifically the other day don’t know the first thing about the recent history of AI” / X

As one of the people questioning Thinking Machines Lab’s valuation, my rebuttal would be -> Adding one AI superstar doesn’t justify that. Even adding 10 AI superstars would not justify that. $50 billion is more than the market cap of Ford.

I’d also tend to disagree with Cody Blakeney claiming ‘now is the right time to go big on model customization and infra’. However, that is a completely different conversation.