An artificial intelligence 'genius' has reportedly turned down a $1 billion job offer to work at Mark Zuckerberg's Meta.
Australian Andrew Tulloch is one of those who have been targeted as part of this drive, with a package that could have been worth $1.5 billion over six years with top bonuses and extraordinary stock performance, according to people familiar with the matter.
Meta has denied that it offered him this much, telling the Wall Street Journal that the package description was "inaccurate and ridiculous."
Tulloch is a lead researcher and co-founder at AI startup Thinking Machines, which claims to be building a future where everyone has access to the tools to make AI work for them.
Its mission statement says: "We see enormous potential for AI to help in every field of work. While current systems excel at programming and mathematics, we're building AI that can adapt to the full spectrum of human expertise and enable a broader spectrum of applications.
"We're building Thinking Machines Lab to make AI systems more widely understood, customizable and generally capable."
It's a relatively new company set up by Open-AI's former chief of technology Mira Murati. Meta reportedly offered to buy the startup and when Murati said no, they started to reach out to Thinking Labs staffers.
Some members of the team were offered between £200m and £500m over a four-year period, while one researcher was reportedly offered a package worth as much as $1bn to join the tech giant.
According to a report by Wired, most offers included an award worth between $50m and $100m in the first year alone.
Thinking Machine is currently valued at US$12 billion (A$18.5 billion).
Tulloch spent 11 years working at Facebook's AI Research Group where he became a distinguished engineer before moving to OpenAI in 2023.
Former Facebook executive Mike Vernal said: "He was definitely known as an extreme genius."
He graduated from the University of Sydney with one of the highest grades among science students and was awarded the university medal in mathematics.
He then went on to study for a master's in mathematical statistics at the University of Cambridge.
Thinking Machines is not the only AI business that Meta is trying to poach employees from.
OpenAI’s chief executive recently revealed that some of his employees had been offered deals worth as much as $100m by Meta.
Several other top researchers have also received generous offers directly from Mr Zuckerberg via personalised WhatsApp messages.
Around 50 leading researchers and experts have already been recruited to his new "superintelligence" lab, after he reportedly grew frustrated with the lack of progress by Meta’s existing engineering teams.
