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Soumith Chintala

CTO · Thinking Machines Lab

high confidenceTier B · Map and watchSecond-wave labsmultimodal

Why they are on the map

Named CTO 14 Jan 2026 after Zoph's exit (ex-Meta FAIR/PyTorch) source — evidence dated 2026-04

Decides whether the problem is funded.

How Thinking Machines Lab buys data

Dedicated 'Data Operations' team (job posted 25 Aug 2026): owns data projects 'from sourcing and vendor selection through quality review and delivery', finds 'the best vendors, experts, and data sources', builds partnerships with data vendors incl. international ones. 'Product Manager - Post Training' (Sep 2026) says Inkling was post-trained across math, agentic code, audio, image, chat and safety with >30M RL rollouts; also open: 'Research, Post-Training Evals' (evals for 'personalized preferences' with 'the data flywheel'), 'Research, Vision Expertise', 'Research, Audio Expertise', 'Research, Post-Training Data'. Inkling safety post (31 Jul 2026) names Scale AI and Handshake AI as external evaluators. Early Inkling post-training data was bootstrapped from Kimi K2.5 outputs (TechCrunch, Jul 2026).

Flat research org under CEO Murati, CTO Soumith Chintala (since Jan 2026) and Chief Scientist John Schulman; 'multimodal-first', one team across modalities. Data Operations sits in Product Management and serves researchers as an internal vendor-management function; post-training has its own PM. Heavy founder churn: Zoph, Metz, Schoenholz (OpenAI, Jan 2026), Tulloch, Joshua Gross (Meta), Chaplot (xAI, Mar 2026), Lilian Weng (left Jul 2026).

Known vendors: scale-ai, handshake-ai, FAR.AI (safety eval), Apollo Research (safety eval)

Full dossier pending

This person was mapped in pass 1. Career, what they have said on the record, interviews, connections, why they matter to us and how to reach them are added in pass 2.