Thinking Machines Lab co-founder Andrew Tulloch heads to Meta (techcrunch.com)

Andrew Tulloch, a co-founder of Thinking Machines Lab, has left the startup to join Meta, the Wall Street Journal reports and Thinking Machines confirmed. Tulloch — who previously worked at OpenAI and Facebook’s AI Research (FAIR) — announced his departure to employees on Friday. The move follows intense interest from Meta in the startup: earlier reporting said Mark Zuckerberg pursued an acquisition and later tried to recruit Tulloch with a compensation package reportedly worth up to $1.5 billion over six years (which Meta denied as “inaccurate and ridiculous”). The departure underscores the high-stakes talent war shaping AI research: senior engineers and researchers with systems and large-model experience are being aggressively courted by big tech, and their moves materially affect smaller AI labs’ roadmaps and competitive edge. For the AI/ML community this signals continued consolidation of deep technical expertise into large platforms — accelerating proprietary capability building (infrastructure, model training scale, deployment) at companies like Meta while raising questions about talent flows, collaboration, and openness of research. For Thinking Machines Lab, losing a co-founder with OpenAI and FAIR pedigree may shift priorities or slow progress; for Meta, it likely strengthens teams focused on large-scale models, tooling and production-grade AI systems.