Tech
AI2's Molmo Team Is Now Inside Meta Research
Aniruddha Kembhavi, last author on the 50-person Molmo paper at AI2, joined Meta's London lab this month after five months at Wayve. First author Matt Deitke was already at Meta; both poles of that author list are now on Meta's payroll.
Aniruddha Kembhavi joined Meta AI Research in London, GeekWire reported on May 13, after a decade at the Allen Institute for AI and five months at Wayve.
His decade at AI2 produced Molmo, a vision-language model that lists him last of 50 authors, the slot reserved for the lab's senior researcher. That paper took best paper honorable mention at CVPR 2025. His robotics navigation model PoliFormer won outstanding paper at CoRL 2024.
In December 2024 he left AI2 for Wayve, the London autonomous driving startup backed by Microsoft and SoftBank. He directed science strategy on GAIA-3, the company's generative world model for autonomy evaluation, which Wayve published on December 2, 2025.
No research paper appeared under his name during those five months. His LinkedIn departure post thanked CEO Alex Kendall and chief scientist Jamie Shotton by name and gave no stated reason for leaving.
He is the second Molmo author to land at Meta. Matt Deitke, the paper's first author, left a startup called Vercept in July 2025 for Meta's Superintelligence Labs at a reported $250 million over four years. He was 24 at the time and had left a University of Washington PhD program.
The Molmo paper's main evaluation tables compared its models against Llama-3.2V-11B and Llama-3.2V-90B, Meta's vision models released the same month. Across those benchmarks, Molmo ran second only to GPT-4o. Both ends of that author list now work for the company whose models sat across the table.
Meta has been moving researchers in both directions. Six researchers from Meta AI had crossed to Thinking Machines Lab by early 2026. The Kembhavi and Deitke hires run the opposite route, from open-source research institutions into Meta's labs.
The hire pattern implies a specific theory of capability-building. Meta shed roughly 600 FAIR and infrastructure roles in October 2025; three months earlier it had already paid Deitke $250 million. That sequencing points to a deliberate substitution at the research layer: Meta dissolved the teams being benchmarked and recruited the people running the benchmark.
AI2 released Molmo 2 in December 2025, after Kembhavi had already left Seattle. Molmo 3 is the next marker. If it loses top rank to a Meta Research London paper, the authorship on both sides of that benchmark will share the same employer.