Lilian Weng Resigns from Thinking Machines Lab Due to Health, 4 of 6 Co-founders Gone
创业邦 · wechat · 2026-07-28
Lilian Weng, co-founder of Thinking Machines Lab and former OpenAI VP of Research and Safety, has announced her resignation due to health reasons. In her farewell letter, she admitted that continuous stress and workload had exceeded her physical limits.
- Brain Drain: Weng is the fourth of the company's six co-founders to leave. Previously, the company faced high-level turbulence, including the dismissal of CTO Barret Zoph, with several core members returning to OpenAI.
- Valuation vs. Reality: Founded by Mira Murati, Thinking Machines Lab was once valued at tens of billions of dollars but only recently released its first multimodal model, Inkling. The continuous disintegration of the core founding team is raising market doubts about the foundation of its high valuation.
Weng is highly prominent in the fields of AI safety and agents, and her departure casts a shadow over the future of this high-profile startup.
Related event: Lilian Weng Leaves Thinking Machines Lab Due to Health Issues(16 posts)→
More from Companies & People
- Indie dev: after fighting Apple review for a month, every new release brings PTSD — jdluk87 · 2026-09-23
- PrimeIntellect Adds Intern to Optimize Its Inference Stack — willcb · 2026-09-23
- Why OpenAI's vertical push into law and finance is 'dead on arrival' — nicolechirps · 2026-09-23
- Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht makes TIME's 2026 executives list as AI crawlers hit 52% of traffic — dinasaur_404 · 2026-09-23
- tszzl: glossy 3D animation is now the single most important skill for launching a new AI model — tszzl · 2026-09-23
- Sam Altman on his highest-return year: dozens of textbooks, helping people, planting seeds — a16z · 2026-09-23