Andrew Tulloch: Perth tech founder reportedly departs own AI company to join Meta

A Perth tech founder has reportedly left his own artificial intelligence company to join Mark Zuckerburg’s Meta.

Andrew Tulloch reportedly announced his departure from Thinking Machines Lab — an artificial intelligence research and product company — in a message to his employees on Friday, according to the Australian Financial Review.

A Thinking Machines Lab spokesperson confirmed Mr Tulloch’s resignation to The Wall Street Journal, saying, “Andrew has decided to pursue a different path for personal reasons.”

It comes just months after Mr Tulloch reportedly rejected a $1.5 billion offer form Zuckerburg to buy Thinking Machines Lab.

Zuckerburg’s offer also reportedly included “top bonuses” and “extraordinary stock performance”, according to The Wall Street Journal.

But Meta spokesperson Andy Stone told the masthead the offer was “inaccurate and ridiculous,” and that Meta was not interested in acquiring Thinking Machines.

Mr Tulloch spent about 11 years at Meta, working his way up as a distinguished engineer, before moving to its rival company, OpenAI, in 2023.

The Christ Church Grammar alumni — who was the school’s vice-captain in 2007 — co-founded Thinking Machines Lab with former OpenAI chief technology officer, Mira Murati, in February.

The company is reportedly valued at about AU$18.5 billion.

“We’re building a future where everyone has access to the knowledge and tools to make AI work for their unique needs and goals,” Thinking Machines’ website reads.

“We’re building Thinking Machines Lab to make AI systems more widely understood, customisable and generally capable.

“We are scientists, engineers and builders who’ve created some of the most widely AI products, including ChatGPT and Character.ai, open-weights models like Mistral, as well as popular open source projects like PyTorch, OpenAI Gym, Fairseq and Segment Anything.”

Mr Tulloch graduated from the University of Sydney in 2011 with First Class Honours before studying a Masters of Mathematical Statistics, Statistics and Machine Learning at Cambridge University.