Tulloch, who is a machine learning expert, worked at Meta for over 11 years as a “Distinguished Engineer”.
Computer scientist Andrew Tulloch has been making headlines after turning down a nine-figure offer – $1 billion (approx Rs 82,000 cr) – from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. According to The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), the offer could have gone up to $1.5 billion over six years, depending on how stocks perform, plus the bonuses.
The outlet further reported that Tulloch wasn’t the first and only Meta reached out to. For context, he is the co-founder of Thinking Machines Lab, an AI startup. Zuckerberg first reached out to the company’s founder, Mira Murati, who previously served as OpenAI’s CTO, with a proposal to acquire the startup. Murati, however, rejected the offer.
This apparently didn’t sit well with Zuckerberg, and he, per the report by The Journal, tried poaching her employees for his company’s new superintelligence unit. Despite the lucrative offer, no one from the startup made the switch.
Although Meta spokesperson Andy Stone dismissed the offer as “inaccurate and ridiculous”, adding that the company had no interest in acquiring the AI startup, WSJ reported, Tulloch’s LinkedIn profile has gone viral on social media.
Who is Andrew Tulloch?
Andrew Tulloch, as per his LinkedIn, is a Member of Technical Staff at Murati’s AI startup, which he co-founded. He previously held a similar role – Member of Technical Staff – in the same role at OpenAI for over a year. There, he worked on ML systems, GPT-4o and GPT-4.5 pretraining, O-series reasoning.
Tulloch, who is a machine learning expert, worked at Meta for over 11 years as a “Distinguished Engineer”. He contributed to projects in machine learning systems and PyTorch.
According to his profile on LinkedIn, he started his career with Goldman Sachs as a strategist in 2010, following an internship at the firm. There, he, as per his own admission, “developed and structured financial products and derivatives across the foreign exchange, commodities, and credit asset classes in FICC. Used statistical and econometric techniques to detect opportunities and develop statistical arbitrage trading strategies across cash equity, equity derivatives and credit derivatives”.
Tulloch’s educational background
Tulloch holds a Master’s in Mathematical Statistics, Statistics and Machine Learning with distinction from the University of Cambridge. He has a Bachelor of Science in Advanced Mathematics, Mathematics, Statistics from the University of Sydney. He attended Christ Church Grammar School in Claremont, where he served as Vice-Captain for activities and societies, and Captain for debating and mock trials.
“My academic interests are mostly machine learning, especially ‘big learning’ – distributed and parallel methods applied to large-scale problems. I’ve had experience implementing large-scale machine learning systems at Facebook, and I’m comfortable working in C++, Python, Go, R, Haskell, Rust, MatLab, and other languages,” he wrote in the “About” section of his website.
Read more on The Financial Express
