Andrew Tulloch turned down Mark Zuckerberg’s $1 billion job offer. His LinkedIn profile is viral

Andrew Tulloch, an Australian computer scientist, has gained attention after turning down a $1.5 billion job offer from Meta.

A graduate of the prestigious University of Cambridge, he started his career as a strategist with Goldman Sachs before an 11 year stint with Meta, where he worked mostly on machine learning. In October 2023, he quit Meta for OpenAI – the company that revolutionized the AI race with ChatGPT. Just over a year later, he moved from OpenAI to Thinking Machines Lab – the AI startup that has become the target of Mark Zuckerberg’s poaching blitz and one that is valued at $12 billion in its seed round despite not having launched a product yet.

Andrew Tulloch reportedly turned down Meta's job offer that could have earned him $1.5 billion over six years.

We are talking about Andrew Tulloch, an Australian computer scientist who turned down Mark Zuckerberg’s job offer that would have potentially earned him as much as $1.5 billion over a period of six years, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

Who is Andrew Tulloch?

Andrew Tulloch is a machine learning expert and co-founder of Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab – a company that aims to take AI beyond chatbots.

He has been in the news ever since he was revealed to be the man who turned down Meta’s staggering nine-figure offer. The Journal report noted that even in Silicon Valley, where big paychecks don’t raise eyebrows, it is rare for someone to turn down a nine-figure salary.

People familiar with the matter said that the $1.5 billion figure is contingent upon bonuses and stock performance.

However, Meta spokesman Andy Stone called the description of the offer “inaccurate and ridiculous”. Stone added that any compensation package is predicated on a stock rising, per the report.

A report in Wired earlier stated that Zuckerberg had been trying to recruit researchers from Thinking Machines Lab for Meta's new superintelligence unit. However, no one at TML has accepted his offers so far.

Andrew Tulloch’s viral LinkedIn profile

A screenshot of Tulloch’s work experience, listed on his LinkedIn profile, has been going viral on social media.

The screenshot charts his dream trajectory from Goldman Sachs to Meta to OpenAI and finally Thinking Machines Lab.

On his own website, Tulloch said he attended “graduate school in mathematical statistics at Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating with distinction (the highest grade).” He also holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Sydney.

Between his bachelor’s and master’s degrees, Tulloch worked at Facebook. “Before graduate school, I worked on machine learning systems at Facebook from April 2012 until starting graduate school in October 2013, working on all aspects of the advertising machine learning platform, from feature engineering to the inference platform to the real-time serving system,” he explained.