Andrew Tulloch, the AI researcher Mark Zuckerberg reportedly courted with a compensation package valued at up to $1.5 billion, has left Meta after roughly one year on the job. His departure, first reported by Semafor, came just a day after Meta released Muse, its new agentic AI platform with coding and computer-use abilities.
Tulloch has not publicly said why he left or where he is headed next. His personal website sums up his time at the company in three words: “working on superintelligence.”
The exit is the latest sign that Silicon Valley’s biggest players cannot hold onto their most prized AI talent, no matter how much money they throw at the problem. And it raises a pointed question: if a package reportedly worth nine figures per year cannot keep a researcher in the building, what exactly is going wrong inside these organizations?
Tulloch, who grew up in Perth, Australia, studied math at the University of Sydney and continued at Cambridge. He co-founded Thinking Machines Lab alongside Mira Murati, the former OpenAI chief technology officer.
The Wall Street Journal reported last year that Zuckerberg first tried to get Meta to acquire Thinking Machines Lab outright. When that effort failed, Zuckerberg reportedly went around the company and approached Thinking Machines staff directly. The result, as Breitbart News detailed, was a job offer for Tulloch that the Journal said could have been worth as much as $1.5 billion over six years, depending on bonuses and Meta’s stock performance.
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone dismissed that figure, calling the Journal’s reporting “inaccurate and ridiculous.” Whatever the actual number, Tulloch took the job.
Inside Meta, Tulloch worked in the company’s TBD lab, which sits within its Superintelligence Labs division. He reported to Alexandr Wang, the billionaire who co-founded and formerly ran Scale AI and now serves as Meta’s AI chief.
Roughly twelve months later, Tulloch walked out the door.
Tulloch’s departure does not exist in a vacuum. The AI sector’s biggest names keep losing the people they need most, often within months of hiring them.
OpenAI, led by Sam Altman, has experienced its own wave of exits. Chloé Bakalar, the company’s head of ethics and reportedly its only dedicated ethicist, left less than a year after joining. Johannes Heidecke, who led OpenAI’s Safety Systems team, announced his departure in July. And Josh Achiam, who previously led OpenAI’s Mission Alignment team before becoming “chief futurist,” reportedly left as well.
Three OpenAI leaders departed within weeks of each other. The company also disbanded its Mission Alignment team earlier this year. The churn suggests that these firms are struggling not just to recruit talent but to keep it, a problem that no amount of stock options or lofty titles seems to fix.
The turmoil extends well beyond individual researchers. Across Silicon Valley, Oracle recently eliminated 21,000 workers as the industry blames AI-driven restructuring for mass layoffs. The technology sector is simultaneously spending unprecedented sums to attract top-tier AI minds and cutting thousands of other positions, a contradiction that speaks to disordered priorities.
The scale of money involved in the Tulloch saga deserves scrutiny. Even if Andy Stone is right and the $1.5 billion figure is inflated, Meta clearly made an extraordinary financial commitment to land one researcher. Zuckerberg reportedly bypassed normal acquisition channels and personally recruited from a startup he could not buy.
That researcher stayed roughly a year.
Meta shareholders, and the broader public watching these companies accumulate power over AI development, are entitled to wonder what they are getting for these outlays. The company’s new Muse platform may prove valuable. But the man Zuckerberg hand-picked to work on “superintelligence” left the day after it launched, without explanation.
The AI arms race among tech giants has produced a peculiar labor market where a single researcher can command compensation packages that dwarf the budgets of entire government agencies. Meanwhile, the energy demands of AI infrastructure are creating real-world consequences for ordinary Americans. Rising energy costs tied to data centers have already forced political figures to reverse their positions on expansion.
The question is whether any of this spending is producing durable results or simply fueling a bidding war that enriches a tiny class of researchers while delivering uncertain returns.
Tulloch has offered no public statement about his reasons for leaving. He has not announced a new role or a return to Thinking Machines Lab. His personal website provides three words and nothing more.
That silence is itself notable. In an industry where departures are routinely accompanied by polished LinkedIn posts about “exciting new chapters,” a clean break with no forwarding address suggests something more than a routine career move.
Meta, for its part, has not commented on the departure beyond Stone’s earlier denial of the compensation figure. The company’s Superintelligence Labs division, under Wang’s leadership, presumably continues its work. But the loss of its most high-profile recruit, the man Zuckerberg reportedly moved heaven and earth to hire, is not a detail that can be papered over with a press release about a new AI platform.
The broader pattern of talent flight at both Meta and OpenAI raises a question that goes beyond corporate HR. These companies are building technology they describe as potentially transformative for civilization. Their own safety teams keep losing leaders. Their most sought-after researchers keep leaving. And the public, including taxpayers already watching billions disappear through government oversight failures, has no meaningful visibility into why.
Silicon Valley wants the public to trust that it can responsibly develop superintelligent AI. It might start by explaining why the people it pays fortunes to build that technology keep heading for the exits.
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