This AI visionary refused a ₹13,000 crore offer from Mark Zuckerberg: Who is Andrew Tulloch?
Tulloch’s decision is seen as significant in the current AI talent wars, where industry leaders are willing to offer unprecedented pay packages to secure expertise.
- Aug 8, 2025,
- Updated Aug 8, 2025 11:27 AM IST
Andrew Tulloch, a leading figure in the artificial intelligence community and cofounder of Thinking Machines Lab, has become the centre of Silicon Valley’s latest high-stakes talent battle.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Tulloch recently declined an extraordinary compensation package from Meta, worth up to $1.5 billion (~₹13,142 crores) over six years, despite his history at the company and the personal involvement of its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.
Tulloch is no stranger to big offers. A respected name in artificial intelligence and cofounder of Thinking Machines Lab, he has built a career at the heart of some of the most influential AI projects of the past decade. But even by Silicon Valley standards, the proposal he turned down recently was staggering.
It all started when Mark Zuckerberg approached Thinking Machines founder Mira Murati with a reported $1 billion acquisition bid, an offer she refused. What followed was a direct campaign to hire her most valuable people, with Tulloch as the primary target.
Meta’s pitch to him reportedly included a pay package worth up to $1.5 billion over six years, combining salary, bonuses and stock awards. For Zuckerberg, it would have been a high-profile hire, and for Tulloch, a return to familiar ground. He had spent more than a decade at Meta, helping to shape its machine learning capabilities and playing a key role in the development of PyTorch, now a cornerstone of global AI research.
After leaving in 2023, Tulloch joined OpenAI, working on the pre-training and reasoning models for GPT-4, before teaming up with Murati to launch Thinking Machines Lab earlier this year. Despite the scale of Meta’s offer, as well as approaches from former colleagues including Alexandr Wang, who is now leading Meta's Superintelligence Lab, Tulloch declined. In fact, Murati later told Wired that not a single member of her team had accepted Meta’s proposals.
Tulloch’s academic credentials are as formidable as his industry record. He graduated from the University of Sydney with first-class honours and a University Medal in mathematics, holds a Master’s from Cambridge, and is pursuing a PhD at UC Berkeley. Industry watchers have speculated that his decision to stay put could be linked to significant equity in Thinking Machines Lab, already valued at over $30 billion.
Meta, for its part, has disputed both the figures and the scope of its recruitment efforts. Spokesperson Andy Stone described the reported numbers as “inaccurate and ridiculous,” adding that any package would be tied to stock performance.
In the escalating race for AI talent, Tulloch’s refusal stands out as a rare case where even an eye-watering sum wasn’t enough to pull an engineer away from building his own vision.
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Andrew Tulloch, a leading figure in the artificial intelligence community and cofounder of Thinking Machines Lab, has become the centre of Silicon Valley’s latest high-stakes talent battle.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Tulloch recently declined an extraordinary compensation package from Meta, worth up to $1.5 billion (~₹13,142 crores) over six years, despite his history at the company and the personal involvement of its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.
Tulloch is no stranger to big offers. A respected name in artificial intelligence and cofounder of Thinking Machines Lab, he has built a career at the heart of some of the most influential AI projects of the past decade. But even by Silicon Valley standards, the proposal he turned down recently was staggering.
It all started when Mark Zuckerberg approached Thinking Machines founder Mira Murati with a reported $1 billion acquisition bid, an offer she refused. What followed was a direct campaign to hire her most valuable people, with Tulloch as the primary target.
Meta’s pitch to him reportedly included a pay package worth up to $1.5 billion over six years, combining salary, bonuses and stock awards. For Zuckerberg, it would have been a high-profile hire, and for Tulloch, a return to familiar ground. He had spent more than a decade at Meta, helping to shape its machine learning capabilities and playing a key role in the development of PyTorch, now a cornerstone of global AI research.
After leaving in 2023, Tulloch joined OpenAI, working on the pre-training and reasoning models for GPT-4, before teaming up with Murati to launch Thinking Machines Lab earlier this year. Despite the scale of Meta’s offer, as well as approaches from former colleagues including Alexandr Wang, who is now leading Meta's Superintelligence Lab, Tulloch declined. In fact, Murati later told Wired that not a single member of her team had accepted Meta’s proposals.
Tulloch’s academic credentials are as formidable as his industry record. He graduated from the University of Sydney with first-class honours and a University Medal in mathematics, holds a Master’s from Cambridge, and is pursuing a PhD at UC Berkeley. Industry watchers have speculated that his decision to stay put could be linked to significant equity in Thinking Machines Lab, already valued at over $30 billion.
Meta, for its part, has disputed both the figures and the scope of its recruitment efforts. Spokesperson Andy Stone described the reported numbers as “inaccurate and ridiculous,” adding that any package would be tied to stock performance.
In the escalating race for AI talent, Tulloch’s refusal stands out as a rare case where even an eye-watering sum wasn’t enough to pull an engineer away from building his own vision.
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