Soumith Chintala Named CTO of Thinking Machines Lab
Soumith Chintala, the Indian-origin AI researcher and co-creator of PyTorch, has been appointed as the new Chief Technology Officer at Thinking Machines Lab, the ambitious AI startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati. The announcement made by Murati on X, highlights Soumith’s decade-plus contributions to the AI field and his role as a ‘major contributor’ to the team.
This appointment comes amid a leadership shakeup at Murati’s lab, following the departure of Barret Zoph, who left for OpenAI. Soumith’s elevation to CTO marks the latest chapter in a remarkable career that spans groundbreaking open-source innovations, leadership at Meta, and a passion for democratizing AI.
Born and raised in Hyderabad, India, Soumith’s journey into the world of AI was far from straightforward. He pursued engineering at the Vellore Institute of Technology in Vellore, and earned his undergraduate degree between 2005 and 2009. This period is said to have laid the foundation for his interest in technology, though he faced rejections and setbacks early on.
Soumith later moved to the US for graduate studies at New York University to delve deeper into AI, robotics, and computer vision. At NYU, he collaborated on robotics projects and began contributing to open-source initiatives, setting the stage for his professional breakthroughs.
Soumith’s professional trajectory took off in 2014 when he joined Meta as a software engineer at the Facebook AI Research lab. Over the next 11 years, he rose to become a VP/Fellow of Engineering, focusing on AI infrastructure, generative AI, and open-source tools.
His greatest legacy is claimed to be co-founding PyTorch in 2016, alongside colleagues at Meta. PyTorch has been instrumental in advancements at companies like Tesla , AstraZeneca, Genentech , and even NASA. Soumith led PyTorch for nearly eight years, handling everything from design and management to bug fixes and community growth.
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Prior to PyTorch, he maintained Torch-7, a Lua-based deep learning library used by Google DeepMind, Twitter, and Meta, and contributed to EBLearn, a C++ framework with Yann LeCun and Pierre Sermanet. His research spans generative models, object detection, human detection, AI for video games, and ML systems. Google Scholar lists his publications with thousands of citations.
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Soumith joined shortly after leaving Meta, initially as a major contributor. His promotion to CTO, as announced by Murati, highlights his expertise in AI infrastructure and research. The lab, focused on advanced AI development, benefits from his track record in scaling open-source projects and fostering innovation.
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Beyond his CTO duties, Soumith dabbles in robotics at NYU, collaborating on projects like Robot Utility Models on Bringing Robots Home, Dexterity from Touch, CLIP-Fields, and Holo-Dex. He is building a household robot for chores and developing simulators for multi-modal AI models.