OpenAI's former CTO Mira Murati's AI startup, Thinking Machines Lab, is bleeding talent. As the company hit its one-year anniversary and triggered employee option cliffs, 13 of the original 42 founding team members have left — nearly a third of the team.
Competitors are poaching engineers who worked on early ChatGPT training with astronomical offers. Departing employees say some packages hit nine figures (hundreds of millions in cash and stock). So far, Meta has taken seven founding members plus a star researcher (including co-founder Andrew Tulloch), OpenAI has taken five (including co-founders Barret Zoph and Luke Metz), and Elon Musk's xAI has taken one.
But the company is still growing: headcount has swelled from 42 to over 150. Recently, PyTorch creator Soumith Chintala left Meta to join as CTO. To stem the exodus, Thinking Machines Lab is hiring someone to overhaul its equity structure.
The one-year cliff is normally a startup's standard defense for retaining its team, but in the feverish AI talent war, it's become a starting gun for mass poaching.