The battle for AI talent in Silicon Valley is intensifying, with Meta now focusing its attention on startups, continuously increasing its efforts to poach talent.

The latest departure is Joshua Gross, a senior software engineer at Thinking Machines. According to his LinkedIn profile, he joined Meta's Super Intelligence Lab last month and is now leading the engineering team. Gross previously worked at OpenAI and Meta, and at Thinking Machines, he built and launched the flagship product Tinker—a creative software that supports AI video, image, 3D model, and comic creation.

This is not the first time Thinking Machines has lost talent. Meta has already recruited five founding members from the company, including co-founder Andrew Tulloch; OpenAI has also lured away its former Chief Technology Officer Barret Zoph and cybersecurity expert Jolene Parish.

Notably, the flow of talent is not one-way. Thinking Machines previously hired Soumith Chintala, the creator of PyTorch, as its Chief Technology Officer, and recruited top competitive programmer Neal Wu. This startup, which completed a $2 billion funding round last year and has a valuation of $12 billion, has more than quadrupled in size since its inception, with approximately 130 employees, making it an important hub for AI talent.

Major companies are spending heavily to retain top talent. According to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Zuckerberg once offered up to $100 million in compensation to poach core talent from OpenAI; Google reportedly offered a $2.4 billion contract to the CEO of AI programming tools company Windsurf; Apple also issued stock bonuses ranging from $200,000 to $400,000 to hardware designers this March.

With a limited pool of AI talent and continuously exploding demand, this competition shows no sign of ending anytime soon.