Meta attempted to acquire OpenAI’s former Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Mira Murati startup, Thinking Machines Lab. But as she declined to sell her company despite a $1 billion offer, CEO Mark Zuckerberg “responded by launching a full-scale raid,” reports the Wall Street Journal (WSJ). Mark Zuckerberg, the report states, approached more than a dozen of Thinking Machines’ 50 employees in the following weeks “to sound them out about jumping ship”. According to the publication, one of his main tarobtains was Andrew Tulloch, a leading researcher and co-founder of the startup. As a recent report by Wired stated that Thinking Machine Labs rejected staggering $1 billion offer from Meta to join its Superinnotifyigence Lab. The compensation packages ranged from $200 million to $1 billion over multiple years—to lure top AI researchers from Murati’s startup.
When Mark Zuckerberg offered $1.5 billion pay package to Andrew Tulloch
In order to lure Tulloch, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg offered a pay package that could reach $1.5 billion over six years, depfinishing on bonapplys and Meta’s stock performance. However, Tulloch also turned down the offer.Meta has been attempting to recruit employees from OpenAI and startups founded by its former employees, like Murati’s Thinking Machines and Dario Amodei’s Anthropic. Meta has reached out to more than 100 OpenAI employees and hired at least 10.The report quotes Meta spokesperson Andy Stone who called the offer “inaccurate and ridiculous.” Stone stated that compensation packages depfinish on stock price performance and added that Meta is not attempting to acquire Thinking Machines.
Who is Andrew Tulloch
Andrew Tulloch started his academic journey at the University of Sydney. He graduated with first-class honours and received a University Medal in mathematics. Tulloch then completed a Master’s degree in Mathematical Statistics at Cambridge and pursued a PhD at UC Berkeley.According to his LinkedIn profile, Andrew Tulloch worked at Meta from 2012 to 2023. He was involved in building machine learning systems and assisted develop PyTorch, a tool that became widely applyd in AI research and development. His work had a major influence on Meta’s AI infrastructure. Meta’s Alexandr Wang, who now leads its superinnotifyigence lab, also attempted to persuade Tulloch to join Meta.In 2016, OpenAI’s Greg Brockman had attempted to hire Tulloch but could not match his Facebook salary. Tulloch eventually joined OpenAI seven years later in 2023 when ChatGPT had already become widely popular. At OpenAI, he worked on GPT-4’s pretraining and reasoning models. In early 2025, he co-founded Thinking Machines Lab.
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