• Source:JND
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Meta's attempt to acquire Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup co-founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, was firmly rejected—even after a $1 billion offer. According to The Wall Street Journal, Murati declined to sell, prompting Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to shift tactics. The report states that he “responded by launching a full-scale raid.”

In the weeks that followed, Meta reportedly approached over a dozen of the startup’s roughly 50 employees, trying to convince them to leave. One of the main targets in this effort was Andrew Tulloch, a leading AI researcher and co-founder of Thinking Machines.

Tulloch Turned Down $1.5 Billion Offer

In an effort to recruit Tulloch, Meta reportedly offered a compensation package worth up to $1.5 billion over six years, tied to performance and stock. Despite the massive offer, Tulloch declined.

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A separate report by Wired revealed that Meta had extended compensation packages ranging from $200 million to $1 billion to multiple employees at Thinking Machines, hoping to bring them into its Superintelligence Lab.

Meta has also been recruiting aggressively from other OpenAI-linked ventures, including Dario Amodei’s Anthropic. So far, the company has reached out to more than 100 OpenAI employees and hired at least 10.

In response to the coverage, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone dismissed the $1 billion acquisition claim as “inaccurate and ridiculous”.

Who Is Andrew Tulloch?

Andrew Tulloch’s academic journey began at the University of Sydney, where he graduated with first-class honours and a University Medal in mathematics. He later earned a master’s degree in mathematical statistics from Cambridge and completed a PhD at UC Berkeley.

Tulloch joined Meta in 2012 and helped build foundational machine learning infrastructure. He also played a key role in developing PyTorch, which became one of the most widely used tools in AI research. He stayed at Meta until 2023, then joined OpenAI as interest in ChatGPT soared. At OpenAI, he contributed to the development of GPT-4, focusing on pretraining and reasoning systems.

Interestingly, OpenAI had first attempted to recruit Tulloch in 2016 but couldn't match his compensation at Facebook. He eventually joined the company seven years later. Tulloch co-founded Thinking Machines Lab with Murati, in early 2025.

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Alexandr Wang, who now heads Meta’s Superintelligence Lab, tried to recruit Tulloch back—but like the rest of Meta’s offers, it didn’t work.

Murati and Tulloch haven’t publicly commented on the reported offers, but their decisions to walk away from billion-dollar figures send a clear message: they’re staying the course with their own vision.