Thinking Machines Lab announces Soumith Chintala as new CTO

Thinking Machines Lab, the AI company co-founded by former OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati, has announced Soumith Chintala as the new CTO. The changes to its leadership team are followed by several senior departures.

Murati said in a post on X that it has parted ways with its CTO, Barret Zoph. Co-founder Luke Metz and founding team member Sam Schoenholz have also left the company. All three are former OpenAI employees.

OpenAI confirmed that Zoph, Metz and Schoenholz have rejoined the company. Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of applications, said the move had been planned for several weeks. “This has been in the works for several weeks, and we’re thrilled to have them join the team. Barret will report to me; Luke and Sam will report to Barret,” Simo said in a post on X.

Chintala was previously a member of the technical staff at the company and is a co-creator of PyTorch, an open-source machine learning framework originally developed at Meta.

Chintala is a graduate of India’s Vellore Institute of Technology, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in information science in 2009. Murati described him as “a brilliant and seasoned leader who has made important contributions to the AI field for over a decade, and he’s been a major contributor to our team. We could not be more excited to have him take on this new responsibility.”

Murati left OpenAI in late 2024 after serving as CTO for six years. She announced the formation of Thinking Machines Lab in early 2025 and has since raised $2 billion in investment.

It has recently introduced its first product, the Tinker API, aimed at helping AI researchers and developers access computing resources more easily.