Andrew Tulloch Departs Mark Zuckerberg's Meta AI Lab

Andrew Tulloch, the star AI researcher who was offered a pay package worth more than $1 billion to join Meta Platforms META 6.55%increase; up pointing triangle last year, is leaving the company, according to people familiar with the situation.

Tulloch’s hiring was a coup for Meta and capped a frantic recruiting spree last summer, when Meta threw money at researchers to try to catch up in the race to build artificial intelligence. He had spent 11 years at Meta before leaving in 2023 for OpenAI and then co-founding Thinking Machines Lab.

Tulloch didn’t say where he was headed when he announced his departure to colleagues on Wednesday. He didn’t respond to requests for comment, and Meta declined to comment on his exit.

His departure adds to a string of high-profile defections among AI researchers. Last month, Google’s chief scientist Jeff Dean left with three other senior researchers to found an AI startup. On Tuesday, an Anthropic researcher quit the company over fears that it and rivals are racing to build technology it won’t ultimately be able to control.

Tulloch is the third Thinking Machines co-founder to switch jobs in recent days. Barret Zoph and Luke Metz last month left OpenAI, where they had gone after Thinking Machines. Zoph joined Google, and Metz joined Meta.

To recruit Tulloch, Meta offered a pay package that could have been worth as much as $1.5 billion with top bonuses and extraordinary stock performance, but Tulloch turned it down, The Wall Street Journal previously reported. A few months later, he ended up joining Meta for an undisclosed sum.

Tulloch announced his exit a day after Meta launched a new AI agent aimed at getting mainstream people to adopt the technology. The agent, if given access, can send emails, shop on the web and complete other tasks for its user. The company has been fighting to get back in the AI race and has released competitive models and a dirt-cheap coding agent in recent months.