Meta pulled 26 researchers in 2025–26, while Thinking Machines’ founding cohort drifted back to OpenAI

Asked (summary):

Which AI researchers moved between frontier labs since 2025? For each move, list the researcher, the lab they left, where they went, and the month.

After collapsing duplicate reports and lab aliases, the evidence yields 61 distinct researcher moves between frontier-model labs from January 2025 through September 2026, each corroborated on at least two independent hosts. This is a best-effort census of publicly reported moves, not a complete personnel registry.

Every move, month by month — one dot per researcher, coloured by destination

Hover or tap a dot for the researcher, route and source. Dots with a dark ring mark researchers who moved more than once in the period.

The June–July 2025 Meta Superintelligence Labs wave took 18 researchers straight from OpenAI — among them Lucas Beyer, Xiaohua Zhai and Shengjia Zhao. techcrunch.com
Thinking Machines Lab launched in February 2025 with a nine-strong ex-OpenAI cohort around Mira Murati, including John Schulman arriving via Anthropic. techcrunch.com
The flow reversed in January 2026: Barrett Zoph, Luke Metz, Samuel Schoenholz and two colleagues left Thinking Machines back to OpenAI, with Lilian Weng following in July. theverge.com
Four researchers moved twice: Andrew Tulloch (OpenAI → TML → Meta → Anthropic), Barrett Zoph, Luke Metz and Lilian Weng each looped through Thinking Machines. wsj.com

All 61 moves — click a header to sort

ResearcherLeftJoinedMonthHostsSpecialtySource
Andrew TullochOpenAIThinking Machines LabFebruary 20258co-founder and leading researcherlindaikejisblog.com
Barrett ZophOpenAIThinking Machines LabFebruary 202528ChatGPT co-creatorreuters.com
John SchulmanAnthropicThinking Machines LabFebruary 202516AI alignmenttheoutpost.ai
Jonathan LachmanOpenAIThinking Machines LabFebruary 20256Former head of special projectstheverge.com
Lilian WengOpenAIThinking Machines LabFebruary 202511Vice president of safetybloomberg.com
Luke MetzOpenAIThinking Machines LabFebruary 20259meta-learning and optimization algorithmstheoutpost.ai
Marco TagliasacchiGoogle DeepMindMicrosoft AIFebruary 20253AI audio and podcasting tools (built “Audio Overviews” for NotebookLM) and AI agents (w…fortune.com
Matthias MindererGoogle DeepMindMicrosoft AIFebruary 20253Vision capabilities — machine learning to understand images and videofortune.com
Mira MuratiOpenAIThinking Machines LabFebruary 202521CTO (chief technology officer)techcrunch.com
Rob FergusGoogle DeepMindMetaMay 20252Head of AI lab (artificial intelligence research)bloomberg.com
Alexander KolesnikovOpenAIMetaJune 202567researcher on Meta's "superintelligence" teamtechcrunch.com
Hongyu RenOpenAIMetaJune 202534AI researcherreuters.com
Jack RaeGoogle DeepMindMetaJune 202523AI researcherreuters.com
Jiahui YuOpenAIMetaJune 202535AI researcherreuters.com
Lucas BeyerOpenAIMetaJune 202569computer vision AItechcrunch.com
Shengjia ZhaoOpenAIMetaJune 202536AI researcherreuters.com
Shuchao BiOpenAIMetaJune 202534AI researcherreuters.com
Trapit BansalOpenAIMetaJune 202535AI reasoning modelstechcrunch.com
Xiaohua ZhaiOpenAIMetaJune 202568researcher on Meta's "superintelligence" teamwsj.com
Allan JabriOpenAIMetaJuly 20254multimodal AImarkets.businessinsider.com
Angela FanMetaOpenAIJuly 20252AI researchwired.com
Aurko RoyMetaMicrosoft AIJuly 20252wired.com
Daniel GrossSafe SuperintelligenceMetaJuly 202510AI products for the superintelligence groupnextomoro.com
Huiwen ChangOpenAIMetaJuly 20255Multimodal models (co-creator of GPT-4o); invented MaskGIT and Muse text-to-image archi…reuters.com
Hyun Won JeongOpenAIMetaJuly 20252mezha.media
Hyung Won ChungOpenAIMetaJuly 202547reasoning and agentslink.theverge.com
Jason WeiOpenAIMetaJuly 202551o1 and deep research modelslink.theverge.com
Ji LinOpenAIMetaJuly 20255Advanced multimodal reasoning systems and Operator reasoning stack, OpenAI's computer-u…fortune.com
Joel PobarAnthropicMetaJuly 202510Infrastructure and inference pipelines for large language modelsfortune.com
Johan SchalkwykGoogle DeepMindMetaJuly 20255Speech AI; Voice Lead at Meta Superintelligence Labsreuters.com
Lu LiuOpenAIMetaJuly 20254multimodal AImarkets.businessinsider.com
Mike DaltonxAIOpenAIJuly 20252infrastructure engineeringwired.com
Pei SunGoogle DeepMindMetaJuly 20259Post-training, coding and reasoning for Geminifortune.com
Uday RuddarrajuxAIOpenAIJuly 20252infrastructure engineeringwired.com
Yuanzhi LiOpenAIMetaJuly 20252researchertheoutpost.ai
Avi VermaMetaOpenAIAugust 20254researcherwired.com
Ethan KnightMetaOpenAIAugust 20254AI researcherwired.com
Joelle PineauMetaCohereAugust 20252AI research leadership (former VP of AI research overseeing Meta’s fundamental AI resea…techcrunch.com
Yang SongOpenAIMetaSeptember 20254Research principal; led the strategic explorations team at OpenAI, with research focuse…wired.com
Andrew TullochThinking Machines LabMetaOctober 202587star AI researcherwsj.com
Soumith ChintalaMetaThinking Machines LabNovember 20256creator of PyTorchjustreadthis.ai
Barrett ZophThinking Machines LabOpenAIJanuary 202652co-founder and CTO of Thinking Machines Labtheverge.com
Ian O'ConnellThinking Machines LabOpenAIJanuary 20262infrastructure engineerbrendonbeebe.substack.com
Lia GuyThinking Machines LabOpenAIJanuary 20267AI researcherwinbuzzer.com
Luke MetzThinking Machines LabOpenAIJanuary 202648Thinking Machines cofoundertheverge.com
Samuel SchoenholzThinking Machines LabOpenAIJanuary 202637researchertheverge.com
Ruoming PangMetaOpenAIFebruary 20262oversaw artificial intelligence infrastructure for Meta's Superintelligence Labsreuters.com
Joshua GrossThinking Machines LabMetaMarch 20262Founding engineer at Thinking Machines Lab who built Tinker, the startup’s core API pro…thenextweb.com
Matt BotvinickGoogle DeepMindAnthropicMarch 20264Studying how AI will impact the legal systemon.theverge.com
Yann LeCunMetaAMI LabsMarch 20262World models research (building world models as an alternative to current LLM approaches)wenagi.com
Zoë HitzigOpenAIAnthropicMarch 20262connecting economic research to model trainingsubstack.com
Weiyao WangMetaThinking Machines LabApril 20262multimodal perception systems and open-world segmentation, including SAM3Dtechcrunch.com
Alexander PritzelGoogle DeepMindAnthropicJune 20265AlphaFold researcher (protein structure prediction)techtimes.com
Arthur ConmyGoogle DeepMindAnthropicJune 20262Train-time alignment (post-training alignment, mechanistic interpretability)explainx.ai
John JumperGoogle DeepMindAnthropicJune 202622Senior research scientist and co-creator of AlphaFoldreuters.com
Jonas AdlerGoogle DeepMindAnthropicJune 20265AlphaFold researcher (protein structure prediction)ft.com
Noam ShazeerGoogle DeepMindOpenAIJune 202610Gemini co-leadtechtimes.com
Lilian WengThinking Machines LabOpenAIJuly 202647AI safety research; leading a top-level team working to accelerate internal research, i…theverge.com
Barrett ZophOpenAIGoogle DeepMindAugust 20264vice president of research, with RL and post-training expertiseusanewsgroup.com
Luke MetzOpenAIMetaAugust 20262core machine learning research; will report directly to Alexandr Wang, Meta’s chief AI …twokq.com
Andrew TullochMetaAnthropicSeptember 20267inference and performance teamgadgetsnow.indiatimes.com

Best-effort census of publicly reported, independently corroborated researcher moves between frontier general-purpose model labs, January 2025 – September 2026. Built from 106 evidence rows collapsed to 61 canonical transitions; lab aliases merged (Google/Alphabet/DeepMind; Meta/Meta AI/MSL; TML variants); for duplicate reports the month with the strongest independent-host support was kept. “Hosts” is the number of independent publishers corroborating a move. Nontechnical executives, product and policy staff, and moves to narrow application startups were excluded, as was one spurious Karpathy row.

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