New York, United States, November 2025 — Soumith Chintala, the pioneering creator of PyTorch and one of today’s most influential AI innovators, has joined Thinking Machines Lab as Member of Technical Staff, marking a major milestone in the company’s rapid global ascent. His transition follows an extraordinary eleven-year tenure at Meta, where he held multiple senior research and engineering leadership positions, driving breakthroughs across AI infrastructure, deep learning frameworks, and frontier model development.
Soumith announced this career move publicly, calling the Thinking Machines team “incredible,” and expressing enthusiasm for contributing to a smaller, deeply experimental, high-research environment—one that is shaping the future of human–AI collaboration.
Soumith’s transition to Thinking Machines Lab comes after an exceptional and transformative eleven-year journey at Meta, where he progressed from Engineering Manager to Distinguished Engineer, VP/Fellow, and later AI Fixer. Over this period, he co-created and led PyTorch from zero users to global adoption, drove major industry partnerships, guided high-risk research efforts, shaped FAIR’s AI systems, and became one of the most cited machine learning researchers in the world. His tenure at Meta reflects more than a decade of building, scaling, and democratizing AI infrastructure that now powers research and enterprise systems globally.
Before rising to global prominence at Meta, Soumith served as a Junior Research Scientist at New York University, where he worked on pioneering deep learning applications in computer vision and natural language understanding. His work produced state-of-the-art results on key benchmarks, resulting in highly cited publications at ICPR and CVPR that accelerated early deep learning adoption in academia and industry.
Prior to NYU, he gained valuable applied research experience at Siemens, where he built systems for autonomous robot navigation and developed deep learning classifiers for cancer detection on histopathology images. Earlier roles at Carnegie Mellon University saw him develop navigation algorithms for biped robots and contribute to early work in face recognition under renowned faculty leaders.
Soumith’s early industry experience spans roles at Museami, where he built machine learning systems for mobile environments, and technical roles in client support and systems administration at New York University, giving him a foundation across software, infrastructure, and research—all of which shaped his unique interdisciplinary engineering approach. Alongside his professional roles, Soumith is also an active angel investor and advisor, with investments across leading AI startups including Runway, Anthropic, Together AI, Lepton AI, Draw Things, Odyssey, K-Scale Labs and many others, reflecting his deep commitment to nurturing the broader AI ecosystem.
About Thinking Machines Lab
Thinking Machines Lab is an advanced artificial intelligence research and product company focused on making AI systems more widely understood, customizable, and genuinely capable for a broad range of human and enterprise needs. Built by scientists and engineers behind some of the world’s most influential AI contributions—including ChatGPT, Character.ai, PyTorch, OpenAI Gym, Segment Anything, Mistral, and others—the organization is committed to bridging long-standing gaps in AI understanding, training transparency, and practical usability.
The company is rapidly emerging as one of the most coveted destinations for top AI talent globally, backed by a $2 billion seed round and ongoing discussions at a $50 billion valuation. With its flagship product Tinker already adopted by leading universities and early enterprise users, Thinking Machines Lab is building foundational technologies that will define the next era of human–AI collaboration.
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