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OpenAI just hired another employee from Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab

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Another employee at Thinking Machines Lab is leaving to rejoin OpenAI.

It’s the latest in a string of departures from the $12 billion AI startup, which is led by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati and lately has been the subject of high-profile poaching campaigns from bigger tech companies.

The latest employee to go back to OpenAI is Jolene Parish, who joined Thinking Machines Lab in April last year, according to her LinkedIn profile. She had worked at OpenAI for three years prior. Before that, she worked for 10 years on security at Apple, her profile says.

Other employees rejoined OpenAI last month. Two co-founders, former CTO Barret Zoph and Luke Metz, both left, along with researcher Sam Schoenholz.

Lia Guy, another researcher, also rejoined OpenAI, The Information reported. Another cofounder, Andrew Tulloch, left for Meta late last year, The Wall Street Journal reported.

OpenAI and Thinking Machines Lab declined to comment.

Thinking Machines Lab raised a monster $2 billion funding round last year, valuing the company at $12 billion, spokespeople said at the time. The startup launched its first product, Tinker, last October.

The San Francisco-based company has become known for attracting star-studded talent. It quietly hired Neal Wu, a legendary coder who won three gold medals in an Olympiad for programming, and Soumith Chintala, the creator of the open-source AI project PyTorch at Meta, who is now Thinking Machines Lab’s CTO, Business Insider previously reported.

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Figure AI CEO says over 170,000 people have applied to his robot company in the last 3 years. He hired fewer than 500.

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A humanoid robotics startup in Silicon Valley appears to have an acceptance rate lower than any Ivy League university.

Figure AI has been flooded with résumés since its founding in 2022, according to the startup’s founder and CEO, Brett Adcock.

“Just checked, 176,000 job applications at Figure the last 3 years,” he wrote in an X post on Saturday. “We’ve hired ~425 people.”

That amounts to a hiring rate of about .24% within the three years. Adcock wrote that most of the submissions were “slop.”

The spread of the 176,000 applications over the three years is unclear. Adcock did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Even if the number of applications were divided equally among the years Figure AI was operating — just under 59,000 applications a year — the acceptance rate would still be lower than that of the hardest university to get into. Caltech had the lowest acceptance rate of 3%, according to US News & World Report’s rankings list.

Adcock wrote in the comments of his X post that the review process has been a slog.

“We go through these one by one like a monkey — it’s incredibly time consuming,” he wrote.

According to the CEO, the “ATS” or applicant tracking system — a software employers use to sift through résumés — can’t save a lot of time if a company is being barraged with hundreds of thousands of applications.

“In the ATS it takes at least 20 seconds of button clicks per submission even if it’s garbage,” he wrote.

Adcock did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A company like Figure AI sits right in the intersection of two trends within the job market.

Today’s job candidates aren’t applying to just a handful of roles. Business Insider’s chief correspondent Aki Ito reported that the average job opening saw 242 applications, citing data from Greenhouse, a leading ATS platform.

“Applying to a job in 2025 really is the statistical equivalent of hurling your résumé into a black hole,” Ito wrote.

On the other hand, Figure AI operates in one of the hottest spaces of the tech industry, that is, robotics and artificial intelligence.

Top tech firms like Meta and OpenAI are in the midst of an AI talent war, offering up to seven- to nine-figure pay packages just to poach superstar AI researchers.

Even tech startups are scrapping for AI talent, floating higher equity packages and other perks that may not come as easily at a big company, such as a co-founding title or more time for research.

Figure AI happens to be one of the leading names in the humanoid robotics space.

The company recently raised more than $1 billion in its Series C funding round — with backing from Parkway Venture Capital, Brookfield Asset Management, and Nvidia, among others — for a $39 billion valuation.

Adcock said on X that he may need to find another way to sift through résumés.

“Need a model to do this for us better, maybe I’ll work on one,” he wrote.




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