Meta’s aggressive pursuit of artificial intelligence expertise has claimed another high-profile recruit. Andrew Tulloch, co-founder of Mira Murati’s AI startup Thinking Machines Lab, has left the company to join Meta Platforms, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday.
A spokesperson for Thinking Machines Lab confirmed the departure to the Journal, saying, “Andrew has decided to pursue a different path for personal reasons.”
The move adds another chapter to Meta’s increasingly forceful campaign to close the gap with rivals such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google in the race to build next-generation AI systems. Tulloch, a key figure in Murati’s fast-rising startup, reportedly received a compensation package that could be worth as much as $1.5 billion over six years, including top-tier bonuses and stock incentives, according to the Journal.
The recruitment follows a series of direct overtures from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who had previously offered to acquire Thinking Machines Lab outright, an approach Murati rejected. After that refusal, Zuckerberg reportedly courted more than a dozen of the startup’s engineers, including Tulloch.
Meta’s tactics have drawn industry-wide attention for their scale and intensity. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said earlier this year that Meta had offered bonuses of up to $100 million to lure senior AI researchers from competitors.
Zuckerberg’s company, long seen as lagging behind in cutting-edge AI research, has recently outspent nearly all rivals in its bid to catch up. Following the underwhelming debut of its Llama 4 model, Meta began offering Silicon Valley’s most lucrative pay packages and negotiating partial startup acquisitions designed to secure both technology and talent.
That strategy is already reshaping the industry. In June, Meta paid $14.3 billion for half of Scale AI, primarily to bring on board its 28-year-old founder Alexandr Wang, who now leads Meta Superintelligence Labs, a new internal AI division. Within weeks, Meta managed to hire eleven senior engineers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.
The broader AI ecosystem has entered an era where the most precious commodity is no longer data or computing power, but people. The world’s most advanced models depend on a small and fiercely contested pool of elite researchers, often just a few hundred individuals globally, whose expertise commands valuations in the hundreds of millions.
Meta’s latest move underscores how personal the battle for human capital has become. With Tulloch’s departure, Thinking Machines Lab loses one of its key architects just months after its co-founder Murati, OpenAI’s former CTO, turned down Zuckerberg’s acquisition offer.
First Appeared on
Source link
