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Soumith Chintala has been named as chief technology officer (CTO) of Thinking Machines Lab, an artificial intelligence research and products company cofounded by OpenAI cofounder Mira Murati.
Hyderabad-born Chintala, who joined Thinking Machines Lab in November 2025, will replace Barret Zoph who stepped down as CTO.
Announcing his appointment, Murati described Chintala as “a brilliant and seasoned leader who has made important contributions to the AI field for over a decade” in a post on microblogging platform X.
He will focus on rebuilding the technical team while pushing forward the company’s AI research agenda, she said.
Murati, a cofounder and former CTO of OpenAI, also served as its interim CEO briefly when Sam Altman was ousted from the company. She quit the ChatGPT maker in September 2024 to found Thinking Machines.
Chintala’s elevation came as Thinking Machines cofounders Zoph and Luke Metz, along with researcher Sam Schoenholz, returned to OpenAI.
OpenAI on Wednesday announced their rehiring.
Chintala, who grew up in Hyderabad and studied at Vellore Institute of Technology and New York University, co-created PyTorch, an open-source machine learning framework that is vital to AI research and industry.
Before joining Thinking Machines, he served as vice president at Meta.
Between 2011 and 2012, Chintala developed one of the fastest AI inference engines for mobile devices. His open-source work on Torch7 led Yann LeCun, former chief AI scientist of Meta, to recruit him to Facebook’s FAIR lab that launched PyTorch in 2017.
It quickly became one of the most widely used frameworks in machine learning.
The shakeup at Thinking Machines comes less than a year after the company was launched in February 2025 as a public benefit corporation. It raised $2 billion in a seed funding round in July at a valuation of $12 billion.
“I rabidly love open-source and open research,” Chintala has declared on his website. “This love is borne out of growing up without answers to all the questions I had. Giving away technology and knowledge is one of the best ways to equal the playing field.”
Chintala has had his share of struggles. Despite scoring 1420 on the GRE, 12 US universities rejected him. He then moved to the US on a J-1 visa before enrolling at NYU. After studies also, he faced a number of rejections and had to deal with visa issues before landing a job as a test engineer at Amazon, according to reports.
Hyderabad-born Chintala, who joined Thinking Machines Lab in November 2025, will replace Barret Zoph who stepped down as CTO.
Announcing his appointment, Murati described Chintala as “a brilliant and seasoned leader who has made important contributions to the AI field for over a decade” in a post on microblogging platform X.
He will focus on rebuilding the technical team while pushing forward the company’s AI research agenda, she said.
Murati, a cofounder and former CTO of OpenAI, also served as its interim CEO briefly when Sam Altman was ousted from the company. She quit the ChatGPT maker in September 2024 to found Thinking Machines.
Chintala’s elevation came as Thinking Machines cofounders Zoph and Luke Metz, along with researcher Sam Schoenholz, returned to OpenAI.
OpenAI on Wednesday announced their rehiring.
Chintala, who grew up in Hyderabad and studied at Vellore Institute of Technology and New York University, co-created PyTorch, an open-source machine learning framework that is vital to AI research and industry.
Before joining Thinking Machines, he served as vice president at Meta.
Between 2011 and 2012, Chintala developed one of the fastest AI inference engines for mobile devices. His open-source work on Torch7 led Yann LeCun, former chief AI scientist of Meta, to recruit him to Facebook’s FAIR lab that launched PyTorch in 2017.
It quickly became one of the most widely used frameworks in machine learning.
The shakeup at Thinking Machines comes less than a year after the company was launched in February 2025 as a public benefit corporation. It raised $2 billion in a seed funding round in July at a valuation of $12 billion.
“I rabidly love open-source and open research,” Chintala has declared on his website. “This love is borne out of growing up without answers to all the questions I had. Giving away technology and knowledge is one of the best ways to equal the playing field.”
Chintala has had his share of struggles. Despite scoring 1420 on the GRE, 12 US universities rejected him. He then moved to the US on a J-1 visa before enrolling at NYU. After studies also, he faced a number of rejections and had to deal with visa issues before landing a job as a test engineer at Amazon, according to reports.
