Former OpenAI employee Andrew Tulloch has accepted Meta’s offer just months after initially turning it down.
Just two months ago, Andrew Tulloch, co-founder of Thinking Machines Lab, turned down a $1 billion offer from Mark Zuckerberg. Now, he’s had a change of heart. Tulloch has headed to Meta, but with a slightly bigger deal – $1.5 billion reportedly. According to a Wall Street Journal report citing a spokeswoman for Thinking Machines Lab, Tulloch chose to “pursue a different path for personal reasons”.
“We’re grateful for what he helped build here and are committed to finishing what we started together,” the spokeswoman was quoted by WSJ as saying.
The report further revealed that Tulloch informed his team of his decision to join Zuckerberg’s company through a message to employees on Friday. With this, he becomes the first person Zuckerberg has successfully poached from Murati’s AI firm – after every other employee, including Murati herself, reportedly declined Meta’s offer.
Who is Andrew Tulloch?
Andrew Tulloch, who has now joined Meta, co-founded Thinking Machines Lab alongside Mira Murati and served there as a Member of Technical Staff. Before that, he held the same position at OpenAI for over a year, where he contributed to machine learning systems, GPT-4o and GPT-4.5 pretraining, and O-series reasoning projects.
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 an intern. In 2010, he rose through the ranks and joined the company as a strategist. He later served at the firm as an 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 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 and 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.
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