Thinking Machines engineer returns to Modal, reflecting on a year of frontier ML infrastructure work
josh_wills · x · 2026-11-10
Engineer Eric Zhang (ekzhang1) announced he's back at Modal. In a reflection post, he recalls his year-plus at Thinking Machines: as the youngest in a 60-person company surrounded by ex-OpenAI/Meta/GDM/Mistral folks, he worked across ML and production systems — new kernels for training and inference, scaling research infra, making interaction models fast, and wrangling RL dynamics.
He says the company reinvented itself many times and, judging by recent model releases, is on a good path. The move also signals Modal's pull in the inference infrastructure scene.
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