Andrew Tulloch, a top AI researcher who made headlines when Mark Zuckerberg lured him to Meta with a pay package that reportedly could have topped $1.5 billion, has left the social media giant after just one year.
Semafor reports that Tulloch’s exit came a day after Meta released Muse, an agentic AI platform with coding and computer-use abilities that the company pitched to everyday tech users rather than developers or AI specialists. Tulloch has not publicly announced why he left Meta or where he’s headed next.
Tulloch worked inside the company’s TBD lab, which sits within the company’s Superintelligence Labs division. He reported to Meta AI chief Alexandr Wang, the billionaire who co-founded and formerly ran Scale AI. Tulloch’s personal website says he grew up in Perth, Australia, studied math at the University of Sydney, then continued his studies at Cambridge. It sums up his work at Meta in three words: “working on superintelligence.”
Tulloch’s name became widely known last year when the Wall Street Journal detailed his rise. He had co-founded Thinking Machines Lab with former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati. Zuckerberg reportedly tried to get Meta to acquire the startup outright, and when that didn’t work, he went around it and approached Thinking Machines staff directly.
One of those offers went to Tulloch: a package that could have been worth as much as $1.5 billion over six years, depending on bonuses and how Meta’s stock performed. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone denied the report at the time, calling it “inaccurate and ridiculous.”
Tulloch eventually took a job at Meta anyway. What he actually ended up being paid there is unknown.
Mark Zuckerberg isn’t the only AI titan suffering a loss of talent. Breitbart News previously reported that Sam Altman’s OpenAI has turned into a revolving door as executives jump ship:
Chloé Bakalar, OpenAI’s head of ethics and reportedly the company’s only dedicated ethicist, has left less than a year after joining. Her exit follows other recent departures among people responsible for safety and alignment work at the company behind ChatGPT.
Johannes Heidecke, who led OpenAI’s Safety Systems team, announced his departure in July. Josh Achiam, who previously led the company’s Mission Alignment team before becoming chief futurist, has also reportedly left. OpenAI had already disbanded the Mission Alignment team earlier this year.
Individually, each departure could be seen as ordinary turnover at a fast-moving technology company. But with three leaders leaving within weeks of each other, questions have emerged about who inside OpenAI has the authority to say a model has gone too far, particularly as the company builds AI systems capable of working with less human oversight.
AI giants continue to face turmoil and high turnover as the industry engages in a multibillion-dollar game of chess. Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall has written his instant bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world.
Read more at Semafor here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.