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Andrew Tulloch, a big name in the artificial intelligence world and cofounder of Thinking Machines Lab, has become the focus of a fierce hiring battle in Silicon Valley. The Wall Street Journal reports that Tulloch recently refused a massive offer from Meta, a pay package worth up to $1.5 billion over six years.
This wasn’t just any job offer. It came directly from Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, who has known Tulloch for years. Tulloch had spent over a decade at Meta, where he helped shape its machine learning systems and played a key role in creating PyTorch, a tool now used widely in AI research.
The push to hire him started after Zuckerberg reportedly tried to buy Thinking Machines Lab from its founder, Mira Murati, for $1 billion. She said no. What followed was an attempt to recruit her top team members, with Tulloch at the top of the list.
Meta’s package included salary, bonuses and stock awards. For Zuckerberg, hiring Tulloch would have been a major win. For Tulloch, it would have meant going back to a company he knew well. But instead, he turned it down. Murati later told Wired that none of her team members had accepted Meta’s offers.
Since leaving Meta in 2023, Tulloch has worked at OpenAI on GPT-4 before teaming up with Murati to start Thinking Machines Lab earlier this year. Some industry watchers think his decision could be tied to the value of his stake in the company, which is already worth over $30 billion.
Tulloch’s academic background is as impressive as his career. He has a first-class honours degree in mathematics from the University of Sydney, a Master’s from Cambridge, and is pursuing a PhD at UC Berkeley.
Meta has denied the reported figures, with spokesperson Andy Stone calling them “inaccurate and ridiculous,” saying any deal would depend on stock performance.
In a tech world where companies pay extraordinary amounts to secure AI talent, Tulloch’s choice is rare, turning down one of the biggest pay packages ever offered in favour of building his own vision.