Thinking Machines Lab Appoints Pytorch Co-Creator Soumith Chintala as CTO

After Barrett Zoph’s exit as CEO, Mira Murati appointed an Indian-origin computer scientist as the new CTO. Here's all you need to know about Soumith Chintala.

Adepu Bindu

16 Jan 2026 — 3 min read

Thinking Machines Lab Appoints Pytorch Co-Creator Soumith Chintala as CTO

Thinking Machines Lab (a new and ambitious artificial intelligence startup) has a new Chief Technology Officer (CTO) after Barrett Zoph left the company to rejoin OpenAI. Mira Murati, the CEO of the company, announced (on platform 'X') on January 15, the appointment of new CTO Soumith Chintala. He is an Indian-origin computer scientist with 10 years of deep experience in AI. And the internet has been looking him up since then. Here's everything you need to know about Soumith Chintala's work and big achievements. Learn more.

Why Is Soumith Chintala So Well Known?

Soumith Chintala is one of the co-creators of PyTorch. The tool is an open-source deep learning framework and is among the most widely used today. It's used by more than 90% of AI researchers and developers worldwide. Major organisations using PyTorch include:

Tesla (self-driving cars)
AstraZeneca (drug discovery)
Genentech (cancer research)
NASA (space research)

Soumith Chintala’s Early Life and Education

Soumith Chintala is basically from Hyderabad, India (born and brought up). He studied engineering at Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT), Vellore. After finishing his undergraduate studies between 2005 and 2009, he faced a lot of rejections and setbacks.

He admits that he was “bad at math” during his school years. Soumith then moved to the United States for higher studies. At New York University, he specialised in Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Computer Vision. He worked on robotics projects and began contributing to open-source software, which later shaped his career. Some notable projects include:

Robot Utility Models: worked on robots that performed well with 90% accuracy without any training.
On Bringing Robots Home: these robots worked in 109 real homes in New York City, completing 81% of the tasks.
Dexterity from Touch, CLIP-Fields, and Holo-Dex.

Soumith Chintala – Career Journey at a Glance

2014 - 2024 Meta (Facebook) – FAIR Lab: He worked as a Software Engineer in AI research and infrastructure. He co-created PyTorch in 2016 and led the team for nearly 8 years.
2024 – 2025 Thinking Machines Lab – Contributed to advanced AI research after leaving Meta.
2025 - Present Thinking Machines Lab – Now leads the AI infrastructure, research, and technical direction of the company.

Soumith Chintala – Biggest Achievements

Area	Achievement	Why His Achievements Matter
Open-source AI	Co-created PyTorch (2016)	Became the world’s most widely used deep learning framework, powering over 90% of AI research and applications
AI Leadership	Led PyTorch for nearly 8 years	Helped scale it from a small project to a global AI standard used by companies, researchers, and universities
Industry Impact	PyTorch adopted by Tesla, NASA, AstraZeneca, Genentech	Enabled real-world breakthroughs in self-driving cars, space research, and drug discovery
Meta Career	Rose to VP / Fellow of Engineering at Meta	Recognition of long-term impact in AI infrastructure, generative AI, and open-source innovation
Research	Key work on GANs (DCGAN, LAPGAN, WGAN)	Influenced modern generative AI used in images, video, and creative tools
Open-source Tools	Maintained Torch-7 before PyTorch	Early AI framework used by Google DeepMind, Twitter, and Meta
Robotics Research	High-success robotics projects at NYU	Achieved up to 90% zero-shot task success and real-world home robot performance
Global Influence	Thousands of citations on Google Scholar	Shows his research is widely trusted and used by the global AI community
Startup Leadership	Appointed CTO of Thinking Machines Lab	Trusted to lead the technical vision of a major new AI startup founded by ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati
AI Investment	Investor in leading AI startups	Supports growth of next-generation AI in video, robotics, and multi-modal systems

Lastly...

Soumith Chintala expressed his happiness and excitement on his LinkedIn profile, saying, "😅 all of this is true." He expressed his gratitude to his father (his father also posted "congratulations" on his LinkedIn) and his mother.