Who is Andrew Tulloch? Mira Murati’s co-founder who rejected a $1.5 billion payday from Mark Zuckerberg

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg tried to buy former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s AI startup Thinking Machines Lab a few months ago. However, when Murati refused, Meta responded by launching a full-scale recruitment drive targeting the startup and approached more than a dozen out of her 50 employees, according to a report by Wall Street Journal. 

However, the chief target for Zuckerberg and Alexandr Wang, Meta’s newly appointed head of Superintelligence Labs, was Murati’s co-founder Andrew Tulloch. Reportedly, Zuckerberg and Wang peppered Tulloch with messages asking him to join and offered a $1 billion pay package. Tulloch could have made as much as $1.5 billion, including top bonuses and stock performance, over a period of six years. 

However, not only did Tulloch say no, none of Thinking Machines Lab’s employees left either. 

Who is Andrew Tulloch? 

Originally from Australia, Tulloch is a co-founder at Thinking Machines Lab. While not much is known about the startup, Murati has raised over $2 billion from investors. The company’s stated mission is to make “AI systems more widely understood, customizable and generally capable.”. 

Murati has said that the startup will share its first product in the “next couple months”. It has reportedly leased an office in a quieter part of San Francisco’s Mission District, a couple of blocks from OpenAI. 

Tulloch graduated from the University of Sydney and had the highest GPA among science students. After that, he worked on machine learning at Facebook for 18 months before starting graduate school at Cambridge. 

He eventually went on to work at Facebook’s AI Research Group and became a distinguished engineer. OpenAI President Greg Brockman tried to hire him in 2016 as one of the company’s first employees, but he was worried about taking a large pay cut from his $800,000 job at Facebook and decided not to join the startup. OpenAI was paying its new recruits an annual salary of $175,000 and a $125,000 annual bonus. 

Tulloch did go on to join OpenAI in 2023 after ChatGPT had already become a viral sensation.

Mark Zuckerberg’s attempt to buy Thinking Machines Lab 

As per a report by Wired, Mira Murati’s AI startup Thinking Machines Lab was offered $1 billion by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta to join its AI Superintelligence team.

“So far at Thinking Machines Lab, not a single person has taken the offer,” Murati was quoted as saying by the outlet.

According to the report, Mira Murati’s team members were offered packages that ranged between $200,000 to $1 billion, every single one of which was rejected as employees refused to join the Meta Superintelligence Lab.

Notably, Zuckerberg has been trying to revive Meta’s AI efforts in recent months after the company’s Llama 4 models failed to gain widespread recognition compared to rival models from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. The Meta CEO has set up a new Superintelligence Labs unit in the company to aim for ‘superintilligence’ — the cognitive performance of the brightest and most gifted human beings. 

Meta has also acquired a 49 percent stake in AI startup Scale AI for $14.8 billion and AI-generated human voices startup Play AI. The company has also tried to poach hundreds of OpenAI researchers and brought at least 10 of them onboard along with many others from Apple, Google and Anthropic.