An award-winning coder has been quietly working for Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup founded by former OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati.
Neal Wu is a three-time gold medal winner at an international programming Olympiad and a founding member of the AI coding startup Cognition, which is valued at $10 billion. He is the elder brother of Scott Wu, the CEO and cofounder of Cognition.
The move shows that Thinking Machines Lab, valued at over $10 billion, continues to attract star talent, even as it has been the target of aggressive AI poaching campaigns from rivals like Meta.
Thinking Machines Lab declined to comment. Wu and Cognition did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.
Business Insider reviewed internal correspondence describing Wu as a team member of Thinking Machines Lab, which helps developers train and customize AI models. Neither Wu nor the secretive startup, which is based in San Francisco, has publicly announced his role.
It’s not clear what Wu’s exact position is. His LinkedIn profile says he has been working as a cofounder and advisor on “something new” since January 2025, around the time Murati’s startup emerged from stealth.
Thinking Machines Lab has seen top staff leave in the last few months.
Meta’s aggressive poaching effort last year saw the tech giant dangling huge offers worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Meta eventually hired cofounder Andrew Tulloch after offering him a compensation package of up to $1.5 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported.
In January, its CTO, Barret Zoph, along with two other founding members, abruptly jumped ship back to OpenAI.
Thinking Machines Lab has a strong staff pedigree, with employees coming from AI labs like OpenAI and Meta. It was valued at more than $10 billion and raised a $2 billion seed round before launching a product.
The startup was seeking funds at a $50 billion valuation, Bloomberg reported in November.
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